In 2016, IceCube initiated a system of public real-time alerts that are typically issued within one minute, following the detection of a neutrino candidate event that is likely to be of astrophysical origin. The goal of these alerts is to enable multi-messenger observations that may identify the neutrino source. Through January 31, 2019, a total of 20 public alerts have been issued, with many of them receiving follow-up observations across multiple wavelength bands. One alert in particular, IceCube-170922A, was found to be associated with a flaring gamma-ray blazar, TXS 0506+056. This was the first >3 sigma association of a high-energy neutrino with an electromagnetic counterpart. In 2019, the IceCube collaboration is introducing a new set of neutrino candidate selections that expand the alert program. These new selections provide two alert channels. A "Gold" channel will issue alerts for neutrino candidates at least 50% likely to be of astrophysical origin and is expected to deliver $\sim$10 alerts per year. Additionally a more frequent "Bronze" channel will provide $\sim$20 alerts per year for neutrino candidates that are between 30% and 50% likely to be of astrophysical origin. We present the neutrino event selections used to generate these alerts, the expected alert rates, and a description of the alert message.
Follow-up observations of transient events are crucial in multimessenger astronomy. We present Astro-COLIBRI as a tool that informs users about flaring events in real-time via push notifications on their mobile phones, thus contributing to enhanced coordination of follow-up observations. We show the software's architecture that comprises a REST API, both a static and a real-time database, a cloud-based alert system, as well as a website and apps for iOS and Android as clients for users. The latter provide a graphical representation with a summary of the relevant data to allow for the fast iden…
Realtime analyses are necessary to identify the source of high energy neutrinos. As an observatory with a 4$π$ steradian field of view and near-100% duty cycle, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a unique facility for investigating transients. In 2016, IceCube established a pipeline that uses low-latency data to rapidly respond to astrophysical events that were of interest to the multi-messenger observational community. Here, we describe this pipeline and summarize the results from all of the analyses performed since 2016. We focus not only on those analyses which were performed in response t…
The detection of the flaring gamma-ray blazar TXS 0506+056 in spatial and temporal coincidence with the high-energy neutrino IC-170922A represents a milestone for multi-messenger astronomy. The prompt multi-wavelength coverage from several ground- and space-based facilities of this special event was enabled thanks to the key role of the $\textit{Fermi}$-Large Area Telescope (LAT), continuously monitoring the gamma-ray sky. Exceptional variable and transient events, such as bright gamma-ray flares of blazars, are regularly reported to the whole astronomical community to enable prompt multi-wave…
IceCube is a cubic-kilometer scale neutrino detector instrumenting a gigaton of ice at the geographic South Pole in Antarctica. On average, 8 track-like high-energy neutrino events with a high probability of being astrophysical are detected and published as alerts per year. The bright appearance of these events in the detector allow a precise pointing to their origins. This work presents a search for cosmic neutrino sources. The analysis uses high statistics archival IceCube neutrino-induced through-going muon samples to search for these sources in the vicinity of the incoming directions of th…
IceCube analyses which look for an astrophysical neutrino signal in the southern sky face a large background of atmospheric muons and neutrinos created by cosmic ray air showers. By selecting starting events in the southern sky, atmospheric muons and neutrinos with accompanying muons are rejected, producing a sample with high astrophysical neutrino purity at lower energies than northern sky samples. Our new selection method looks for muon tracks from a neutrino interaction with a vertex contained inside the detector volume by using the good pointing resolution of the track morphology to create…
The next galactic supernova presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to obtain detailed information about the explosion of a star and the extreme conditions found within its core. A core-collapse supernova will produce a neutrino burst visible up to half a day before the electromagnetic radiation from the explosion, so the burst will provide an early warning for optical follow-up. Since local supernovae are exceedingly rare, it is critical that neutrino detectors provide prompt alerts after the arrival of a burst. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory operates with $>99\%$ uptime and is sensitive …
We report on the search for optical counterparts to IceCube neutrino alerts released between April 2016 and August 2021 with the All-Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN). Despite the discovery of a diffuse astrophysical high-energy neutrino flux in 2013, the source of those neutrinos remains largely unknown. Since 2016, IceCube has published likely-astrophysical neutrinos as public realtime alerts. Through a combination of normal survey and triggered target-of-opportunity observations, ASAS-SN obtained images within 1 hour of the neutrino detection for 20% (11) of all observable IceCu…
The era of multimessenger astrophysics has arrived with the simultaneous operation of large cosmic-ray, gamma-ray, neutrino, and gravitational-wave observatories. In just the past two years, an electromagnetic (EM) counterpart was detected for a gravitational wave event, and evidence for an EM counterpart of high energy neutrinos has been identified. These measurements have had a major impact on our view of the non-thermal universe, but understanding cosmic accelerators require a substantial increase in the number of multimessenger observations. The Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Net…
We use IceCube's high-statistics, neutrino-induced, through-going muon samples to search for astrophysical neutrino sources. Specifically, we analyze the arrival directions of IceCube's highest energy neutrinos. These high-energy events allow for a good angular reconstruction of their origin. Additionally, they have a high probability to come from an astrophysical source. On average, 8 neutrino events that satisfy these selection criteria are detected per year. Using these neutrino events as a source catalog, we present a search for the production sites of cosmic neutrinos. In this contributio…
The realtime follow-up of neutrino events is a promising approach to search for astrophysical neutrino sources. It has so far provided compelling evidence for a neutrino point source: the flaring gamma-ray blazar TXS 0506+056 observed in coincidence with the high-energy neutrino IceCube-170922A detected by IceCube. The detection of very-high-energy gamma rays (VHE, $\mathrm{E} > 100\,\mathrm{GeV}$) from this source helped establish the coincidence and constrained the modeling of the blazar emission at the time of the IceCube event. The four major imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope arrays …
We report on the search of astrophysical gamma rays with energies in the 100 TeV to several PeV range arriving in directional and temporal coincidence with public alerts from HAWC (TeV gamma rays) and IceCube (neutrinos above ~100 TeV). The observations have been performed with the Carpet-2 air-shower detector at the Baksan Neutrino Observatory, working in the "photon-friendly" mode since 2018. Photon candidate showers are selected by their low muon content. No significant excess of the photon candidates have been observed, and upper limits on gamma-ray fluences associated with the alerts are …
A high-energy neutrino event detected by IceCube on 22 September 2017 was coincident in direction and time with a gamma-ray flare from the blazar TXS 0506+056. Prompted by this association, we investigated 9.5 years of IceCube neutrino observations to search for excess emission at the position of the blazar. We found an excess of high-energy neutrino events with respect to atmospheric backgrounds at that position between September 2014 and March 2015. Allowing for time-variable flux, this constitutes 3.5σ evidence for neutrino emission from the direction of TXS 0506+056, independent of and pri…
The sources of IceCube neutrinos are as yet unknown. The multi-messenger observation of their emission in $γ$-rays can be a guide to their identification, as exemplified by the case of TXS 0506+056. We suggest a new method of searching for $γ$-rays with Imaging Air Cherenkov Telescopes from sources in coincidence with possible astrophysical neutrinos. We propose that searches of $γ$-rays are extended, from the current practice of only a few days, to up to one month from a neutrino alert. We test this strategy on simulated sources modeled after the blazar \emph{TXS 0506+056-like}, emitting neut…
The recent association between IC-170922A and the blazar TXS0506+056 highlights the importance of real-time observations for identifying possible astrophysical neutrino sources. Thanks to its near-100\% duty cycle, 4$π$ steradian field of view, and excellent sensitivity over many decades of energy, IceCube is well suited both to generate alerts for follow-up by other instruments and to rapidly follow up alerts generated by other instruments. Detection of neutrinos in coincidence with transient astrophysical phenomena serves as a smoking gun for hadronic processes and supplies essential informa…
The high-energy muon neutrino events of the IceCube telescope, that are triggered as neutrino alerts in one of two probability ranks of astrophysical origin, "gold" and "bronze", have been followed up by the Baikal-GVD in a fast quasi-online mode since September 2020. Search for correlations between alerts and GVD events reconstructed in two modes, muon-track and cascades (electromagnetic or hadronic showers), for the time windows $ \pm $ 1 h and $ \pm $ 12 h does not indicate statistically significant excess of the measured events over the expected number of background events. Upper limits on…
In this work, we investigate the likelihood of association between realtime, TeV-PeV energy neutrino alerts from IceCube and optical counterparts in the form of core-collapse supernovae (CC SNe). The optical follow-up of IceCube alerts requires two main instrumental capabilities: (1) deep imaging, since 73\% of neutrinos would come from CC SNe at redshifts $z > 0.3$, and (2) a large field of view (FoV), since typical IceCube muon neutrino pointing accuracy is on the order of $\sim1$~deg. With Blanco/DECam ($gri$ to 24th magnitude and $2.2$~deg diameter FoV), we performed a triggered optical fo…
Investigating IceCube Neutrino Alerts with the HAWC $γ$-Ray Observatory
Instituto de Física, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学物理研究所）；Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas（恰帕斯自治大学）；Instituto de Astronomía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学天文学研究所）；Universidad de Costa Rica（哥斯达黎加大学）；Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo（米却肯圣尼古拉斯德伊达尔戈大学）；Temple University（天普大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）
Following the detection of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos in 2013, their origin is still unknown. Aiming for the identification of an electromagnetic counterpart of a rapidly fading source, we have implemented a realtime analysis framework for the IceCube neutrino observatory. Several analyses selecting neutrinos of astrophysical origin are now operating in realtime at the detector site in Antarctica and are producing alerts to the community to enable rapid follow-up observations. The goal of these observations is to locate the astrophysical objects responsible for these neutrino signals.…
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is the world's largest neutrino detector, instrumenting a cubic kilometer of ice at the geographic South Pole. The detector probes neutrino energies from GeV to PeV, and collects high statistics neutrino samples by virtue of its extremely large volume. IceCube was designed to detect high-energy neutrinos from potential cosmic ray acceleration sites such as active galactic nuclei, gamma ray bursts and supernova remnants. IceCube announced the detection of a diffuse flux of astrophysical neutrinos in 2013, including the highest energy neutrinos ever detected. Ice…
Neutrino astronomy saw its birth with the discovery by IceCube of a diffuse flux at energies above 60 TeV with intensity comparable to a predicted upper limit to the flux from extra-galactic sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). While such an upper limit corresponds to the case of calorimetric sources, in which cosmic rays lose all their energy into photo-pion production, the first statistically significant coincident observation between neutrinos and gamma rays was observed from a blazar of intriguing nature. A very-high-energy muon event, of most probable neutrino energy of 290 …
The detection of an astrophysical flux of high-energy neutrinos by IceCube is a major step forward in the search for the origin of cosmic rays, as this emission is expected to originate in hadronic interactions taking place in or near cosmic-ray accelerators. No neutrino point sources, or a significant correlation with known astrophysical objects, have been identified in the IceCube data so far that could reveal the location of the neutrino emission sites. The hadronic interactions responsible for the neutrino emission should also lead to the production of high-energy gamma rays from neutral p…
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…
IceCube detects more than 100,000 neutrinos per year in the GeV- to PeV-energy range. Among those, we have isolated a flux of high-energy cosmic neutrinos. I will discuss the instrument, the analysis of the data, the significance of the discovery of cosmic neutrinos, and the recent multi-messenger observation of a flaring TeV blazar in coincidence with the IceCube neutrino alert IC170922.
On 22 September 2017, IceCube reported a high-energy neutrino event which was found to be coincident with a flaring blazar, TXS 0506+056. This multi-messenger observation hinted at blazars contributing to the observed high-energy astrophysical neutrinos and raised a need for extensive correlation studies. Recent work shows that the internal absorption of gamma rays, and their interactions intrinsic to the source and with the extragalactic background, will cause a lack of energetic gamma-ray and neutrino correlation while hinting towards a correlation between neutrinos and lower photon energy o…
The H.E.S.S. Imaging Air Cherenkov Telescope system is, due to its fast reaction time and its comparably low energy threshold, very well suited to perform follow-up observations of detections at other wavelengths or other messengers like high-energy neutrinos and gravitational waves. These advantages are utilized optimally via a fully automatized system reacting to alerts from various partner observatories covering various wavelengths and astrophysical messengers. In this contribution we'll provide an overview and present recent results from H.E.S.S. programs to follow up on multi-wavelength a…
The IceCube neutrino telescope monitors one cubic kilometer of deep Antarctic ice by detecting Cherenkov photons emitted from charged secondaries produced when neutrinos interact in the ice. The geometry of the detector, which comprises a lattice of 5160 photomultipliers, is optimized for the detection of neutrinos above 100 GeV. However, at subfreezing ice temperatures, dark noise rates are low enough that a high flux of MeV neutrinos streaming through the detector may be recognized by a collective rate enhancement in all photomultipliers. This method can be used to search for the signal of c…
Sources of astrophysical neutrinos can potentially be discovered through the detection of neutrinos in coincidence with electromagnetic or gravitational waves. Real-time alerts generated by IceCube play an important role in this search, acting as triggers for follow-up observations with instruments sensitive to other wavelengths. Once a high-energy event is detected by the IceCube real-time program, a complex and time consuming direction reconstruction method is run in order to calculate an accurate localisation. To investigate the effect of systematic uncertainties on the uncertainty estimate…
We present the dissection in space, time, and energy of the region around the IceCube-170922A neutrino alert. This study is motivated by: (1) the first association between a neutrino alert and a blazar in a flaring state, TXS 0506+056; (2) the evidence of a neutrino flaring activity during 2014 - 2015 from the same direction; (3) the lack of an accompanying simultaneous $γ$-ray enhancement from the same counterpart; (4) the contrasting flaring activity of a neighbouring bright $γ$-ray source, the blazar PKS 0502+049, during 2014 - 2015. Our study makes use of multi-wavelength archival data acc…
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic kilometer-sized detector designed to detect neutrinos of astrophysical origin. However, muons created by cosmic rays interacting in the atmosphere pose a significant background for these astrophysical neutrinos particularly in the southern equatorial sky. Identifying neutrino events that start in the detector allows us to reduce the atmospheric muon component while retaining a high rate of starting neutrino events. The method presented today also rejects atmospheric neutrinos if they are accompanied by muons from the same cosmic ray shower, lowering …
Largest Solar Neutrino Flare may be soon detectable by Deep Core neutrino detector immediately and comunicate to satellites or astronauts. Its detection is the fastest manifestation of a later (tens minutes,hours) dangerous cosmic shower. The precursor trigger maybe saving satellites and even long flight astronauts lives. We shall suggest how. Moreover their detection may probe the inner solar flare acceleration place as well as the neutrino flavor mixing in a new different parameter windows. We show the updated expected rate and signature of neutrinos and antineutrinos in largest solar flare …
Blazars constitute the vast majority of extragalactic $γ$-ray sources. They can also contribute a sizable fraction of the diffuse astrophysical neutrinos detected by IceCube. In the past few years, the real-time alert system of IceCube has led to multiwavelength follow-up of very high-energy neutrino events of plausible astrophysical origin. Spatial and temporal coincidences of these neutrino events with the high-activity state of $γ$-ray blazars can provide a unique opportunity to decipher cosmic-ray interactions in the relativistic jets. Assuming that blazars accelerate cosmic rays up to ult…
Three-quarters of the 1 cubic kilometer neutrino telescope IceCube is currently taking data. Current models predict high-energy neutrino emission from transient objects like supernovae (SNe) and gammaray bursts (GRBs). To increase the sensitivity to such transient objects we have set up an optical follow-up program that triggers optical observations on multiplets of high-energy muon-neutrinos. We define multiplets as a minimum of two muon-neutrinos from the same direction (within 4 deg) that arrive within a 100 s time window. When this happens, an alert is issued to the four ROTSE-III telescop…
The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) follow-up campaign of alerts released by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has led to the likely identification of the transient AT2019fdr as the source of the neutrino event IC200530A. AT2019fdr was initially suggested to be a tidal disruption event in a Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 galaxy. However, the combination of its spectral properties, color evolution, and feature-rich light curve suggests that AT2019fdr may be a Type IIn superluminous supernova. In the latter scenario, IC200530A may have been produced via inelastic proton-proton collisions between the relat…
