We report on the first search for extra-terrestrial neutrino-induced cascades in IceCube. The analyzed data were collected in the year 2007 when 22 detector strings were installed and operated. We will discuss the analysis methods used to reconstruct cascades and to suppress backgrounds. Simulated neutrino signal events with a E-2 energy spectrum, which pass the background rejection criteria, are reconstructed with a resolution dlogE ~ 0.27 in the energy range from ~20 TeV to a few PeV. We present the range of the diffuse flux of extra-terrestrial neutrinos in the cascade channel in IceCube within which we expect to be able to put a limit.
We have built regions in a Sky map where it should be expected the arrival of 120 EeV ultrahigh energy cosmic rays (UHECR) directionally correlated with the latest astrophysical neutrino tracks observed at IceCube, which are taken as point sources. In order to calculate these arrival directions we have considered contributions to the cosmic rays deflections originated by the galactic and the extragalactic magnetic field, and a UHECR composition compatible with the current expectations. We have used the Jansson-Farrar JF12 model for the Galactic magnetic field and an extragalactic magnetic fiel…
Neutrino production and oscillation physics can be studied by utilizing the very high flux of atmospheric neutrinos observed with IceCube. In a Cherenkov medium such as ice, atmospheric muon neutrino interactions create tracks while cascades (showers) are produced by atmospheric electron neutrinos and by neutral current interactions of all flavors. We present the first detection of atmospheric neutrino-induced cascades at energies between 30 GeV and 10 TeV using the DeepCore array of the IceCube detector. Using 281 days of data, 1029 events are observed with 59% predicted to be cascades.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, which detects Cherenkov light from charged particles produced in neutrino interactions, firmly established the existence of an astrophysical high-energy neutrino component. The expected neutrino flavor composition on Earth is $ν_e:ν_μ:ν_τ$ of about 1:1:1 for neutrinos produced in astrophysical sources through pion decay. A measurement of the flavor composition on Earth can provide important constraints on sources and production mechanisms within the standard model, and can also constrain various beyond-standard-model processes. Here the measu…
The IceCube detector is an all-flavor neutrino telescope. For several years IceCube has been detecting muon tracks from charged-current muon neutrino interactions in ice. However, IceCube has yet to observe the electromagnetic or hadronic particle showers or "cascades" initiated by charged or neutral-current neutrino interactions. The first detection of such an event signature will likely come from the known flux of atmospheric electron and muon neutrinos. A search for atmospheric neutrino-induced cascades was performed using a full year of IceCube data. Reconstruction and background rejection…
In this paper we report the results of a $γ$-ray study of IceCube's extraterrestrial neutrino candidates detected as track-like events. Using 70 months of Fermi-LAT observations, a likelihood analysis of all $1-300$ GeV photons within 5 degrees of the track-like neutrino candidates' origin was undertaken, to search for spatially coincident $γ$-ray emission. One of IceCube's HESE track events was found to be spatially coincident with a $γ$-ray bright active galactic nucleus (AGN), PKS 0723-008. We find however, that the chance probability for Fermi-LAT detected AGN to be spatially coincident wi…
We propose an interpretation of the two neutrino initiated cascade events with PeV energies observed by IceCube: Ultra-high energy cosmic ray protons (or Fe nuclei) scatter on CMB photons through the Delta-resonance (the Berezinsky-Zatsepin process) yielding charged pions and neutrons. The neutron decays give electron-antineutrinos which undergo neutrino oscillations to populate all antineutrino flavors, but the electron-antineutrino flux remains dominant. At 6.3 PeV electron-antineutrino energy their annihilation on electrons in the IceCube detector is enhanced by the Glashow resonance (the W…
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, which detects Cherenkov light from charged particles produced in neutrino interactions, firmly established the existence of an astrophysical high-energy neutrino component. Here I present IceCube's High-Energy Starting Event sample and the new results obtained with a livetime of about 7.5 years. I will focus on the new measurement of the flavor composition performed using this sample. IceCube is directly sensitive to each neutrino flavor via the single cascade, track and double cascade event topologies, the latter being the topology produced …
The IceCube neutrino observatory has detected two cascade events with energies near 1 PeV. Without invoking new physics, we analyze the source of these neutrinos. We show that atmospheric conventional neutrinos and cosmogenic neutrinos (those produced in the propagation of ultra-high- energy cosmic rays) are strongly disfavored. For atmospheric prompt neutrinos or a diffuse background of neutrinos produced in astrophysical objects, the situation is less clear. We show that there are tensions with observed data, but that the details depend on the least-known aspects of the IceCube analysis. Ver…
IceCube collaboration has seen an unexpected population of high energy neutrinos compatible with an astrophysical origin. We consider two categories of events that can help to diagnose cosmic neutrinos: double pulse, that may allow us to clearly discriminate the cosmic component of tau neutrinos; cascades with deposited energy above 2 PeV, including events produced by electron antineutrinos at the Glashow resonance, that can be used to investigate the neutrino production mechanisms. We show that one half of the double pulse signal is due to the neutrinos spectral region already probed by IceCu…
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory first observed a diffuse flux of high energy astrophysical neutrinos in 2013. Since then, this observation has been confirmed in multiple detection channels such as high energy starting events, cascades, and through-going muon tracks. Combining these event selections into a high statistics global fit of 10 years of IceCube's neutrino data could strongly improve the understanding of the diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux: challenging or confirming the simple unbroken power-law flux model as well as the astrophysical neutrino flux composition. One key component …
IceCube is an all-flavor, cubic kilometer neutrino telescope currently under construction in the deep glacial ice at the South Pole. Its embedded optical sensors detect Cherenkov light from charged particles produced in neutrino interactions in the ice. For several years IceCube has been detecting muon tracks from charged-current muon neutrino interactions. However, IceCube has yet to observe the electromagnetic or hadronic particle showers or "cascades" initiated by charged-current or neutral-current neutrino interactions. The first detection of such an event signature is expected to come fro…
The Telescope Array (TA) has observed a statistically significant excess in cosmic-rays with energies above 57 EeV in a region of approximately 1150 square degrees centered on coordinates (R.A. = 146.7, Dec. = 43.2). We note that the location of this excess correlates with two of the 28 extraterrestrial neutrinos recently observed by IceCube. The overlap between the two IceCube neutrinos and the TA excess is statistically significant at the 2$σ$ level. Furthermore, the spectrum and intensity of the IceCube neutrinos is consistent with a single source which would also produce the TA excess. Fin…
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory detects high energy astrophysical neutrinos in two event topologies: tracks and cascades. Since the flavor composition of each event topology differs, tracks and cascades can be used to test the neutrino properties and the mechanisms behind the neutrino production in astrophysical sources. Assuming a conventional model for the neutrino production, the IceCube data sets related to the two channels are in $>3σ$ tension with each other. Invisible neutrino decay with lifetime $τ/m=10^2$ s/eV solves this tension. Noticeably, it leads to an improvement over the stand…
The IceCube experiment (IC) has recently observed 2 cascade events with energies between 1 and 10 PeV. This energy combined with the fact that no muon-track events are observed may be interpreted as a cosmogenic $\bar ν_e$ interacting in IC via the Glashow resonance (GR) $\bar ν_e e \to W^-\to$ (hadrons or $\bar ν_e e$). We point out a unique, background-free signature of the GR, a single isolated muon unaccompanied by any shower activity from the interaction $\bar ν_e e \to W^-\to \bar ν_μμ^-$, and propose it as a test of this interpretation. We calculate the event numbers and find that a sin…
Dark matter decaying or annihilating into mu+mu- or tau+tau- has been proposed as an explanation for the e+e- anomalies reported by PAMELA and Fermi. Recent analyses show that IceCube, supplemented by DeepCore, will be able to significantly constrain the parameter space of decays to mu+mu-, and rule out decays to tau+tau- and annihilations to mu+mu- in less than five years of running. These analyses rely on measuring track-like events in IceCube+DeepCore from down-going nu_mu. In this paper we show that by instead measuring cascade events, which are induced by all neutrino flavors, IceCube+Dee…
IceCube has discovered a flux of astrophysical neutrinos, and more recently has used muon-neutrino datasets to present evidence for one source; a flaring blazar known as TXS 0506+056. However, the sources responsible for the majority of the astrophysical neutrino flux remain elusive. Opening up new channels for detection can improve sensitivity and increase the discovery potential. In this work we present a new neutrino dataset relying heavily on Deep-Neural-Networks (DNN) to select cascade events produced from neutral-current interactions of all flavors and charged-current interactions with f…
The IceCube Collaboration has recently reported evidence for a high-energy extraterrestrial neutrino flux. During two years of operation 28 events with energies between 30 TeV and 1.2 PeV were observed while only 10.6 events were expected from conventional atmospheric backgrounds. The hadronic interactions responsible for this IceCube excess will also produce a flux of high-energy gamma-rays that can serve as a probe of source direction and distance. We show that existing TeV to PeV diffuse gamma-ray limits support the interpretation that the IceCube excess is mostly of extragalactic origin. H…
Recently (May-November 2013) highest energy neutrino events have been presented by ICECUBE. Most (21) of all these (28) events are cascades shower whose flux exhibits a sharp hardening respect other lower energy atmospheric neutrino component, events suggesting an injection of extraterrestrial neutrino, mostly nu e, nu tau, making cascades. ICECUBE claimed that a component (10:6+5:0 3:6), a third, of these events must be a trace of expected downward muons and-or atmospheric neutrinos (muon track dominated): The probability that this scenario occurs is very poor, about 0.1- 0.5%. The paradox mi…
The 2-years MESE IceCube events show a slightly excess in the energy range 10-100 TeV with a maximum local statistical significance of 2.3$σ$, once a hard astrophysical power-law is assumed. A spectral index smaller than 2.2 is indeed suggested by multi-messenger studies related to $p$-$p$ sources and by the recent IceCube analysis regarding 6-years up-going muon neutrinos. In the present paper, we propose a two-components scenario where the extraterrestrial neutrinos are explained in terms of an astrophysical power-law and a Dark Matter signal. We consider both decaying and annihilating Dark …
Highest energy neutrino events (contained) in cubic km ICECUBE detector resulted in last three years to be as many as $37-2=35$ signals (two of those having been recently discharged); these tens-hundred TeV (32 energetic events) up to rarest (only 3) PeV cascade showers, proved to have an extraterrestrial origin. The UHE neutrino flavor transition from a $ν_μ$ atmospheric dominance (over $ν_{e}$ showers at TeV energy), toward a higher energy shower cascade ($ν_{e}$, $ν_τ$) events at few tens TeV up to PeV energy is a hint of such a fast extraterrestrial injection. The majority (28 out of 35) o…
A signal of high-energy extraterrestrial neutrinos from unknown source(s) was recently discovered by the IceCube experiment. Neutrinos are always produced together with gamma-rays, but the gamma-ray flux from extragalactic sources is suppressed due to attenuation in the intergalactic medium. We report the discovery of a gamma-ray excess at high Galactic latitudes starting at energies 300 GeV in the data of the Fermi telescope. We show that the multi-TeV gamma-ray diffuse emission has spectral characteristics at both low and high Galactic latitudes compatible with those of the IceCube high neut…
The IceCube Collaboration has announced the discovery of a neutrino flux in excess of the atmospheric background. Due to the steeply falling atmospheric background spectrum, events at PeV energies are most likely of extraterrestrial origin. We present the multiwavelength properties of the six radio brightest blazars positionally coincident with these events using contemporaneous data of the TANAMI blazar sample, including high-resolution images and spectral energy distributions. Assuming the X-ray to γ-ray emission originates in the photoproduction of pions by accelerated protons, the integrat…
We present a novel analysis method for the determination of the neutrino-nucleon Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS) cross section in the TeV - PeV energy range utilizing neutrino absorption by the Earth. We analyze five years of data collected with the complete IceCube detector from May 2011 to May 2016. This analysis focuses on electromagnetic and hadronic showers (cascades) mainly induced by electron and tau neutrinos. The applied event selection features high background rejection (< 10% background contamination below 60 TeV, background free above 60 TeV) of atmospheric muons and high signal ef…
We analyze the scenario where the IceCube high energy neutrino events are explained in terms of an extraterrestrial flux due to two different components: a contribution coming from know astrophysical sources for energies up to few hundreds TeV and a top-down contribution originated by the decay of heavy dark matter particles with a mass of few PeV. Contrary to previous approaches, we consider a leptophilic three-body decay that dominates at PeV energies due to the absence of quarks in the final state. We find that the theoretical predictions of such a scenario are in a slightly better agreemen…
The IceCube Neutrino Detector observes tens of thousands of atmospheric neutrinos every year with its low energy extension DeepCore, covering the neutrino energy range from GeV to TeV. These neutrinos can be used to study particle interactions in conditions that are inaccessible to current accelerator-based experiments. Here, we present constraints concerning the production of light and strange mesons in atmospheric particle cascades using a dedicated analysis based on the shape of the neutrino spectrum in zenith and energy. We report the first measurement of the atmospheric K/Pi-ratio in a co…
The IceCube (IC) collaboration recently reported the detection of TeV-PeV extraterrestrial neutrinos whose origin is yet unknown. By the photon-neutrino connection in $pp$ and $pγ$ interactions, we use the \fermi-LAT observations to constrain the origin of the IC detected neutrinos. We find that Galactic origins, i.e., the diffuse Galactic neutrinos due to cosmic ray (CR) propagation in the Milky Way, and the neutrinos from the Galactic point sources, may not produce the IC neutrino flux, thus these neutrinos should be of extragalactic origin. Moreover, the extragalactic gamma-ray bursts (GRBs…
The discovery of extraterrestrial neutrinos in the $\sim$ 30 TeV -- PeV energy range by IceCube provides new constraints on high energy astrophysics. An important background to the signal are the prompt neutrinos which originate from the decay of charm hadrons produced by high energy cosmic-ray particles interacting in the Earth's atmosphere. It is conventional to use the calculations of charm hadroproduction using gluon splitting $g \to c \bar c$ alone. However, QCD predicts an additional "intrinsic" component of the heavy quark distribution which arises from diagrams where heavy quarks are m…
The origins of the extraterrestrial neutrinos observed in IceCube have yet to be determined. In this study we perform a one-point fluctuation analysis of the six-year high-energy starting event (HESE) shower data, with fixed non-Poissonian contributions from atmospheric, Galactic and some extragalactic components, as well as an isotropic (and weakly non-Poissonian) template. In addition to the star-forming galaxies and blazars, our analysis suggests the presence of an additional isotropic component, not associated with any known class of sources, with best-fit intensity of $(2.8\pm0.2)\times 1…
Cosmological parameters deduced from the Planck measurements of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background are at some tension with direct astronomical measurements of various parameters at low redshifts. Very recently, it has been conjectured that this discrepancy can be reconciled if a certain fraction of dark matter is unstable and decays between recombination and the present epoch. Herein we show that if the superheavy relics have a branching into neutrinos B (X \to ν\bar ν) \sim 3 \times 10^{-9}, then this scenario can also accommodate the recently discovered extraterrestrial flux of…
The IceCube experiment has recently reported the observation of 28 high-energy (> 30 TeV) neutrino events, separated into 21 showers and 7 muon tracks, consistent with an extraterrestrial origin. In this letter we compute the compatibility of such an observation with possible combinations of neutrino flavors with relative proportion (alpha_e:alpha_mu:alpha_tau). Although the 7:21 track-to-shower ratio is naively favored for the canonical (1:1:1) at Earth, this is not true once the atmospheric muon and neutrino backgrounds are properly accounted for. We find that, for an astrophysical neutrino …
The first detection of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos by IceCube provides new opportunities for tests of neutrino properties. The long baseline through the Cosmic Neutrino Background (C$ν$B) is particularly useful for directly testing secret neutrino interactions ($ν$SI) that would cause neutrino-neutrino elastic scattering at a larger rate than the usual weak interactions. We show that IceCube can provide competitive sensitivity to $ν$SI compared to other astrophysical and cosmological probes, which are complementary to laboratory tests. We study the spectral distortions caused by $ν$SI …
We report on the first search for atmospheric and for diffuse astrophysical neutrino-induced showers (cascades) in the IceCube detector using 257 days of data collected in the year 2007-2008 with 22 strings active. A total of 14 events with energies above 16 TeV remained after event selections in the diffuse analysis, with an expected total background contribution of $8.3\pm 3.6$. At 90% confidence we set an upper limit of $E^2Φ_{90%CL}<3.6\times10^{-7} GeV \cdot cm^{-2} \cdot s^{-1}\cdot sr^{-1} $ on the diffuse flux of neutrinos of all flavors in the energy range between 24 TeV and 6.6 PeV a…
A variety of new physics models allows for neutrinos to up-scatter into heavier states. If the incident neutrino is energetic enough, the heavy neutrino may travel some distance before decaying. In this work, we consider the atmospheric neutrino flux as a source of such events. At IceCube, this would lead to a "double-bang" (DB) event topology, similar to what is predicted to occur for tau neutrinos at ultra-high energies. The DB event topology has an extremely low background rate from coincident atmospheric cascades, making this a distinctive signature of new physics. Our results indicate tha…
Since the discovery of a neutrino flux in excess of the atmospheric background by the IceCube Collaboration, searches for the astrophysical sources have been ongoing. Due to the steeply falling background towards higher energies, the PeV events detected in three years of IceCube data are the most likely ones to be of extraterrestrial origin. Even excluding the PeV events detected so far, the neutrino flux is well above the atmospheric background, so it is likely that a number of sub-PeV events originate from the same astrophysical sources that produce the PeV events. We study the high-energy p…
The IceCube Collaboration has published four years of data and the observed neutrino flux is significantly in excess of the expected atmospheric background. Due to the steeply falling atmospheric background spectrum, events at the highest energies are most likely extraterrestrial. In our previous approach we have studied blazars as the possible origin of the High-Energy Starting Events (HESE) neutrino events at PeV energies. In this work we extend our study to include all HESE neutrinos (which does not include IC 170922A) at or above a reconstructed energy of 100 TeV, but below 1 PeV. We study…
The IceCube experiment has recently released 3 years of data of the first ever detected high-energy (>30 TeV) neutrinos, which are consistent with an extraterrestrial origin. In this talk, we compute the compatibility of the observed track-to-shower ratio with possible combinations of neutrino flavors with relative proportion (alpha_e:alpha_mu:alpha_tau). Although this observation is naively favored for the canonical (1:1:1) at Earth, once we consider the IceCube expectations for the atmospheric muon and neutrino backgrounds, this flavor combination presents some tension with data. We find tha…
We report on results of an all-sky search for high-energy neutrino events interacting within the IceCube neutrino detector conducted between May 2010 and May 2012. The search follows up on the previous detection of two PeV neutrino events, with improved sensitivity and extended energy coverage down to approximately 30 TeV. Twenty-six additional events were observed, substantially more than expected from atmospheric backgrounds. Combined, both searches reject a purely atmospheric origin for the twenty-eight events at the $4σ$ level. These twenty-eight events, which include the highest energy ne…
It has been speculated that Lorentz-invariance violation (LIV) might be generated by quantum-gravity (QG) effects. As a consequence, particles may not travel at the universal speed of light. In particular, superluminal extragalactic neutrinos would rapidly lose energy via the bremssthralung of electron-positron pairs (nu -> nu e+ e-), damping their initial energy into electromagnetic cascades, a figure constrained by Fermi-LAT data. We show that the two cascade neutrino events with energies around 1 PeV recently detected by IceCube -if attributed to extragalactic diffuse events, as it appears …
The discovery of extraterrestrial very-high-energy neutrinos by the IceCube collaboration has launched a quest for the identification of their astrophysical sources. Gamma-ray blazars have been predicted to yield a cumulative neutrino signal exceeding the atmospheric background above energies of 100 TeV, assuming that both the neutrinos and the gamma-ray photons are produced by accelerated protons in relativistic jets. Since the background spectrum falls steeply with increasing energy, the individual events with the clearest signature of being of an extraterrestrial origin are those at PeV ene…
Although they are best known for studying astrophysical neutrinos, neutrino telescopes like IceCube can study neutrino interactions, at energies far above those that are accessible at accelerators. In this writeup, I present two IceCube analyses of neutrino interactions at energies far above 1 TeV. The first measures neutrino absorption in the Earth, and, from that determines the neutrino-nucleon cross-section at energies between 6.3 and 980 TeV. We find that the cross-sections is 1.30 $^{+0.21}_{-0.19}$ (stat.) $^{+0.39}_{-0.43}$ (syst.) times the Standard Model cross-section. We also present…
After four years of data taking, the IceCube neutrino telescope has detected 54 high-energy starting events (HESE, or contained-vertex events) with deposited energies above 20TeV. They represent the first ever detection of high-energy extraterrestrial neutrinos and therefore, the first step in neutrino astronomy. In order to study the energy, flavor and isotropy of the astrophysical neutrino flux arriving at Earth, we perform different analyses of two different deposited energy intervals, [10 TeV $-$ 10 PeV] and [60 TeV $-$ 10 PeV]. We first consider an isotropic unbroken power-law spectrum an…
Measuring the Astrophysical Galactic Plane Neutrino Flux and Searching for Galactic PeVatrons using the IceCube Multi-Flavor Astrophysical Neutrino Sample
The detection of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos of extraterrestrial origin by the IceCube neutrino observatory in Antarctica has opened a unique window to the cosmos that may help to probe both the distant Universe and our cosmic backyard. The arrival directions of these high-energy events have been interpreted as uniformly distributed on the celestial sphere. Here, we revisit the topic of the putative isotropic angular distribution of these events applying Monte Carlo techniques to investigate a possible anisotropy. A modest evidence for anisotropy is found. An excess of events appears p…
Neutrino telescopes provide strong sensitivity to sterile neutrino oscillations through matter-enhanced oscillation, occurring in the few TeV energy range for eV$^{2}$-scale neutrino mass-squared splittings. Prior searches have focused on $ν_μ$ disappearance, which has a particularly strong sensitivity to the mixing angle $θ_{24}$ via $ν_μ\rightarrowν_s$ transitions. Nowadays, the $ν_μ\rightarrowν_e$ and $ν_μ\rightarrowν_τ$ appearance channels have been considered less promising at neutrino telescopes, due in part to the much smaller target volume for cascades relative to tracks. This work exp…
The atmospheric neutrino data collected by the IceCube experiment and its low-energy extension DeepCore provide a unique opportunity to probe the neutrino sector of the Standard Model. In the low energy range the experiment have observed neutrino oscillations, and the high energy data are especially sensitive to signatures of new physics in the neutrino sector. In this context, we previously demonstrated the unmatched potential of the experiment to reveal the existence of light sterile neutrinos. The studies are routinely performed in the simplest 3+1 model concentrating on disappearance of mu…
Neutrino telescopes such as IceCube search for an excess of high energy neutrinos above the steeply falling atmospheric background as one approach to finding extraterrestrial neutrinos. For samples of events selected to start in the detector, the atmospheric background can be reduced to the extent that a neutrino interaction inside the fiducial volume is accompanied by a detectable muon from the same cosmic-ray cascade in which the neutrino was produced. Here we provide an approximate calculation of the veto probability as a function of neutrino energy and zenith angle.
The muon and anti-muon neutrino energy spectrum is determined from 2000-2003 AMANDA telescope data using regularised unfolding. This is the first measurement of atmospheric neutrinos in the energy range 2 - 200 TeV. The result is compared to different atmospheric neutrino models and it is compatible with the atmospheric neutrinos from pion and kaon decays. No significant contribution from charm hadron decays or extraterrestrial neutrinos is detected. The capabilities to improve the measurement of the neutrino spectrum with the successor experiment IceCube are discussed.
