Prof Subir Sarkar

Abstract:

It has been observed [1,2] that the locally measured Hubble parameter converges quickest to the background value and the dipole structure of the velocity field is smallest in the reference frame of the Local Group of galaxies. We study the statistical properties of Lorentz boosts with respect to the Cosmic Microwave Background frame which make the Hubble flow look most uniform around a particular observer. We use a very large N-Body simulation to extract the dependence of the boost velocities on the local environment such as underdensities, overdensities, and bulk flows. We find that the observation [1,2] is not unexpected if we are located in an underdensity, which is indeed the case for our position in the universe. The amplitude of the measured boost velocity for our location is consistent with the expectation in the standard cosmology.

Abstract:

IceTop is an air-shower array located on the Antarctic ice sheet at the geographic South Pole. IceTop can detect an astrophysicalflux of neutrons from Galactic sources as an excess of cosmic-ray air showers arriving from the source direction. Neutrons are undeflected by the Galactic magneticfield and can typically travel 10(E/PeV)pc before decay. Two searches are performed using 4 yr of the IceTop data set to look for a statistically significant excess of events with energies above 10 PeV(10^16 eV) arriving within a small solid angle. The all-sky search method covers from−90°to approximately −50°in declination. No significant excess is found. A targeted search is also performed, looking for significant correlation with candidate sources in different target sets. This search uses a higher-energy cut(100 PeV) since most target objects lie beyond 1 kpc. The target sets include pulsars with confirmed TeV energy photon fluxes and high-mass X-ray binaries. No significant correlation is found for any target set. Flux upper limits are determined for both searches, which can constrain Galactic neutron sources and production scenarios.

Abstract:

We present the first IceCube search for a signal of dark matter annihilations in the Milky Way using all-flavour neutrino-induced particle cascades. The analysis focuses on the DeepCore sub-detector of IceCube, and uses the surrounding IceCube strings as a veto region in order to select starting events in the DeepCore volume. We use 329 live-days of data from IceCube operating in its 86-string configuration during 2011–2012. No neutrino excess is found, the final result being compatible with the background-only hypothesis. From this null result, we derive upper limits on the velocity-averaged self-annihilation cross-section,<σAv>, for dark matter candidate masses ranging from 30 GeV up to 10 TeV, assuming both a cuspy and a flat-cored dark matter halo profile. For dark matter masses between 200 GeV and 10 TeV, the results improve on all previous IceCube results on <σAv>, reaching a level of 10^−23 cm3 s^−1 , depending on the annihilation channel assumed, for a cusped NFW profile. The analysis demonstrates that all-flavour searches are competitive with muon channel searches despite the intrinsically worse angular resolution of cascades compared to muon tracks in IceCube.

Abstract:

The IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole has measured the atmospheric muon neutrino spectrum as a function of zenith angle and energy in the approximate 320 GeV to 20 TeV range, to search for the oscillation signatures of light sterile neutrinos. No evidence for anomalous ν_{μ} or ν[over ¯]_{μ} disappearance is observed in either of two independently developed analyses, each using one year of atmospheric neutrino data. New exclusion limits are placed on the parameter space of the 3+1 model, in which muon antineutrinos experience a strong Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein-resonant oscillation. The exclusion limits extend to sin^{2}2θ_{24}≤0.02 at Δm^{2}∼0.3  eV^{2} at the 90% confidence level. The allowed region from global analysis of appearance experiments, including LSND and MiniBooNE, is excluded at approximately the 99% confidence level for the global best-fit value of |U_{e4}|^{2}.