For the first time, the IceCube Collaboration is making public every detail of the only cubic-kilometer neutrino detector to date, from a flasher board in the digital optical modules—aka DOMs—to the calibration processes that allow researchers to measure the properties of neutrinos, or to the IceCube Live website that IceCubers use to monitor what is going on in the detector. The publication, over 70 pages long, has just been submitted to the Journal of Instrumentation. […]
A new study from the IceCube Collaboration searched in three years of IceCube data for directional clustering of neutrinos around gamma-ray sources associated with blazars from the second Fermi-LAT AGN catalog. Although some enhancements in the observed neutrino rate from these blazars were found in the 3–30 TeV region, all of them are compatible with fluctuations of the atmospheric neutrino background. These results, recently submitted to The Astrophysical Journal, open several new analyses exploring blazars as very high energy neutrino sources. […]
IceCube’s collaborative efforts with gamma-ray, X-ray, and optical telescopes started long ago. Now, the IceCube, MAGIC and VERITAS collaborations present updates to their follow-up programs that will allow the gamma-ray community to collect data from specific sources during periods when IceCube detects a higher number of neutrinos. Details of the very high energy gamma-ray follow-up program have been submitted to the Journal of Instrumentation. […]
The IceCube Collaboration has just announced the results of a search for point-like sources using track-like neutrino candidates detected by IceCube over seven years, from 2008 to 2015. No source has been identified, but the sensitivity keeps improving at a fast pace and will allow IceCube to test accurate models that suggest that sources could soon be observed. These results have just been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. […]
The IceCube Collaboration has expanded dark matter studies with a search for annihilations in the center of the Earth. Researchers have used one year of data—May 2011 to May 2012—and have not found an excess of neutrinos above the expected background. The results have set new limits on the annihilation rate of WIMPs in the Earth that are an order of magnitude stronger than previous results by AMANDA and that also improve the IceCube spin-independent cross section limits for a WIMP mass of 50 GeV. This study has just been submitted to The European Physical Journal C. […]
Growing up on a small, secluded hobby farm in southwestern Wisconsin, the night sky played a major role in my upbringing. Since there is almost no light pollution, the night sky was always bright and clear. In the summer months, my bedtime was determined by the time a specific satellite went over the house. Every year, my family would gather up all the blankets in the house and lay outside to watch meteor showers for hours. From a young age, I loved the idea of learning more about the stars and planets, and as I got into high school, I fell in love with physics. My original plan was to become a high school physics teacher, and I found the University of Wisconsin–River Falls (UWRF) not only has a fantastic physics program but is also involved with IceCube. I had heard about IceCube in 2013, when it won Physics World’s Breakthrough of the Year, and working for IceCube became my new goal and dream. […]
During my summer abroad, I worked with Dr. Jon Dumm, who is searching for an excess of neutrino events originating in the plane of the Milky Way. Dr. Dumm’s analysis is designed to look for a diffuse neutrino flux from the galactic plane in agreement with a map of where pion decay is expected to occur. However, this analysis is sensitive to a neutrino flux from point sources that are not necessarily distributed as the pion decay map predicts. We simulated four possible models of cosmic-ray source density in the galaxy as proxies for possible distributions of unresolved neutrino point sources. In doing so, we established limits on the total flux from various numbers of sources to which the primary pion-decay-based analysis is sensitive. […]
At the start of the summer, UW-River Falls student Nick Jensen and I set out to create a 1:1000 scale model of the IceCube detector using LEDs to represent DOMs. To do this, we needed a wide assortment of parts to construct the model from the ground up. We spent the first half of the summer trying to gather all the parts needed for building. […]
In an effort to fill in the blanks of the Standard Model of particle physics, science has been conducting a diligent search for a hypothesized particle known as the “sterile neutrino.” Now, with the latest results from an icy particle detector at the South Pole, scientists are almost certain that there is no such particle. […]
The IceCube Collaboration is now accumulating more statistics in the search for the sources of very high energy neutrinos, but also to learn more about their nature. In a new study, submitted this week to the Astrophysical Journal, the collaboration reports a substantially improved observation of the diffuse muon neutrino flux in the Northern Hemisphere using six years of IceCube data with about a tenfold increase in statistics. Once more, a clear astrophysical contribution has been found, which at the highest energies excludes a purely atmospheric origin at the 5.6 sigma level. Also, the accuracy of the measurement of the spectral properties has been improved.
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