Particle theory

Abstract:

We report on the search for neutrino-induced particle-showers, so-called cascades, in the IceCube-40 detector. The data for this search was collected between April 2008 and May 2009 when the first 40 IceCube strings were deployed and operational. Three complementary searches were performed, each optimized for different energy regimes. The analysis with the lowest energy threshold (2 TeV) targeted atmospheric neutrinos. A total of 67 events were found, consistent with the expectation of 41 atmospheric muons and 30 atmospheric neutrino events. The two other analyses targeted a harder, astrophysical neutrino flux. The analysis with an intermediate threshold of 25 TeV lead to the observation of 14 cascade-like events, again consistent with the prediction of 3.0 atmospheric neutrino and 7.7 atmospheric muon events. We hence set an upper limit of $E^2 \Phi_{lim} \leq 7.46\times10^{-8}\,\mathrm{GeV sr^{-1} s^{-1} cm^{-2}}$ (90% C.L.) on the diffuse flux from astrophysical neutrinos of all neutrino flavors, applicable to the energy range 25 TeV to 5 PeV, assuming an $E_{\nu}^{-2}$ spectrum and a neutrino flavor ratio of 1:1:1 at the Earth. The third analysis utilized a larger and optimized sample of atmospheric muon background simulation, leading to a higher energy threshold of 100 TeV. Three events were found over a background prediction of 0.04 atmospheric muon events and 0.21 events from the flux of conventional and prompt atmospheric neutrinos. Including systematic errors this corresponds to a $2.7\sigma$ excess with respect to the background-only hypothesis. Our observation of neutrino event candidates above 100 TeV complements IceCube's recently observed evidence for high-energy astrophysical neutrinos.

Abstract:

IceCube is a one-gigaton instrument located at the geographic South Pole, designed to detect cosmic neutrinos, iden- tify the particle nature of dark matter, and study high-energy neutrinos themselves. Simulation of the IceCube detector and processing of data require a significant amount of computational resources. IceProd is a distributed management system based on Python, XML-RPC and GridFTP. It is driven by a central database in order to coordinate and admin- ister production of simulations and processing of data produced by the IceCube detector. IceProd runs as a separate layer on top of other middleware and can take advantage of a variety of computing resources, including grids and batch systems such as CREAM, Condor, and PBS. This is accomplished by a set of dedicated daemons that process job submission in a coordinated fashion through the use of middleware plugins that serve to abstract the details of job submission and job management from the framework.

Abstract:

Accurate measurement of neutrino energies is essential to many of the scientific goals of large-volume neutrino telescopes. The fundamental observable in such detectors is the Cherenkov light produced by the transit through a medium of charged particles created in neutrino interactions. The amount of light emitted is proportional to the deposited energy, which is approximately equal to the neutrino energy for $\nu_e$ and $\nu_\mu$ charged-current interactions and can be used to set a lower bound on neutrino energies and to measure neutrino spectra statistically in other channels. Here we describe methods and performance of reconstructing charged-particle energies and topologies from the observed Cherenkov light yield, including techniques to measure the energies of uncontained muon tracks, achieving average uncertainties in electromagnetic-equivalent deposited energy of $\sim 15\%$ above 10 TeV.