In response to a reported increase in the total neutrino flux in the Homestake experiment in coincidence with solar flares at the end of the eighties, solar neutrino detectors have searched for solar flare signals. Solar flares convert magnetic energy into thermal energy of plasma and kinetic energy of charged particles such as protons. As a consequence of magnetic reconnection, protons are injected downwards from the coronal acceleration region and can interact with dense plasma in the lower solar atmosphere, producing mesons that will subsequently decay into gamma rays and neutrinos at O(MeV-GeV) energies. The main motivation to search for solar flare neutrinos comes from their hadronic origin. As inherent products of high-energy proton collisions with the chromosphere, they are a direct probe of the proton accelerated towards the chromosphere. Using a multi-messenger approach, it is therefore possible to constrain the proton acceleration taking place in the solar flares, including the spectral index of the accelerated flux and its shape. We present the results of the first search for GeV neutrinos emitted during solar flares carried out with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. We present a new approach which allows us to strongly lower the energy threshold of IceCube, originally designed to detect 10 GeV - PeV neutrinos. We compare the results with theoretical estimates of the corresponding flux.
The largest Solar flare have been recorded in gamma flash and hard spectra up to tens GeV energy. The present building and upgrade of Hyper-Kamiokande (HK) and IceCube (as well as Deep Core, PINGU) neutrino detectors do offer a novel way to largest trace of solar Flare: their sudden anti-neutrino (or neutrino) flare made by proton scattering and pion decays via Delta resonance production. These signals might be observable at largest flare by HK via soft spectra up to tens- hundred MeV energy and by IceCube-PINGU at higher, GeV up to hundred GeV, energies. We show the expected rate of signals f…
Recently the IceCube collaboration and 15 other collaborations reported the spatial and temporal coincidence between the neutrino event IceCube-170922A and the radio-TeV activity of the blazar TXS 0506+056. Their further analysis on 9.5 years of IceCube data discovered neutrino flare between September 2014 and March 2015, when TXS 0506+056 is however in "quiescent" state. We analyze the Fermi-LAT data in that direction, and find another bright GeV source PKS 0502+049, which is at an angle of $1.2^{\circ}$ from TXS 0506+056, with strong activties during the neutrino flare. No other bright GeV s…
Since the end of the eighties and in response to a reported increase in the total neutrino flux in the Homestake experiment in coincidence with a solar flare, solar neutrino detectors have searched for solar flare signals. Neutrinos from the decay of mesons, which are themselves produced in collisions of accelerated protons with the solar atmosphere, would provide a novel window on the underlying physics of the acceleration process. For our studies we focus on the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a cubic kilometer neutrino detector located at the geographical South Pole. Due to its Supernova data…
Recent results from IceCube regarding TXS 0506+056 suggest the presence of neutrino flares that are not temporally coincident with a significant corresponding gamma ray flare. Such flares are particularly difficult to identify, as their presence must be inferred from the temporal distribution of neutrino data alone. Here we present the results of using a novel method to search for all such flares across the entire neutrino sky in 10 years of IceCube data, using both Gaussian and box-shaped flare hypotheses. Unlike for past searches, that looked for only the most significant neutrino flare in t…
This paper reports on recent results from measurements of energy spectrum and nuclear composition of galactic cosmic rays performed with the IceCube Observatory at the South Pole in the energy range between about 300 TeV and 1 EeV.
A time-dependent search for neutrino flares from pre-defined directions in the whole sky is presented. The analysis uses a time clustering algorithm combined with an unbinned likelihood method. This algorithm provides a search for significant neutrino flares over time-scales that are not fixed a-priori and that are not triggered by multiwavelength observations. The event selection is optimized to maximize the discovery potential, taking into account different time-scales of source activity and background rates. The method is applied to a pre-defined list of bright and variable astrophysical so…
The evaluation of mass composition of cosmic rays in the knee region ($\sim 3$ PeV) is critical to understanding the transition in the origin of cosmic rays from galactic to extragalactic sources. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole is a multi-component detector consisting of the surface IceTop array and the deep in-ice IceCube detector. By applying modern machine-learning techniques to cosmic-ray air showers reconstructed coincidentally in both detector components of IceCube observatory, the energy and the mass of primary cosmic rays in this transition region can be measured. I…
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory with its 1-km^3 in-ice detector and the 1-km^2 surface detector (IceTop) constitutes a three-dimensional cosmic ray detector well suited for general cosmic ray physics. Various measurements of cosmic ray properties, such as energy spectra, mass composition and anisotropies, have been obtained from analyses of air showers at the surface and/or atmospheric muons in the ice.
Atmospheric neutrino oscillations with DeepCore; Supernova detection with IceCube and beyond; Study of South Pole ice transparency with IceCube flashers; Submitted papers to the 32nd International Cosmic Ray Conference, Beijing 2011.
The completed IceCube Observatory, the first km^3 neutrino telescope, is already providing the most stringent limits on the flux of high energy cosmic neutrinos from point-like and diffuse galactic and extra-galactic sources. The non-detection of extra-terrestrial neutrinos has important consequences on the origin of the cosmic rays. Here the current status of astrophysical neutrino searches, and of the observation of a persistent cosmic ray anisotropy above 100 TeV, are reviewed.
Blazars are prime candidate sources for the high energy neutrinos recently detected by IceCube. Being one of the brightest sources in the extragalactic X-ray and $γ$-ray sky as well as one of the nearest blazars to Earth, Mrk 421 is an excellent source for testing the scenario of the blazar-neutrino connection. Here, we model the spectral energy distribution of Mrk 421 during a 13-day flare in 2010 with unprecedented multi-wavelength coverage, and calculate the respective neutrino flux. We find a correlation between the $>1$ PeV neutrino and photon fluxes, in all energy bands. Using typical Ic…
In 2018, the IceCube collaboration reported evidence for the identification of a blazar as an astrophysical neutrino source. That evidence is briefly summarised here before focusing on the prospects of tau neutrino physics in IceCube, both at high energies (astrophysical neutrinos) and at lower energies (atmospheric neutrino oscillations). In addition, future neutrino detectors such as KM3NeT and the IceCube Upgrade and their tau neutrino physics potential are discussed. Finally, the detection mechanism for high-energy (tau) neutrinos in the Pierre Auger Observatory and the resulting flux uppe…
Blazars are among the most powerful steady sources in the Universe. Multi-messenger searches for blazars have traditionally focused on their gamma-ray emission, which can be produced simultaneously with neutrinos in photohadronic interactions. However, X-ray data can be equally vital to constrain the SED of these sources, since the hadronically co-produced gamma-rays could get absorbed by the ambient photon fields and cascade down to X-ray energies before escaping. In this work, we present the outline for an untriggered, time-dependent analysis of neutrino flares from the direction of X-ray se…
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the Pierre Auger Observatory and the Telescope Array: Joint Contribution to the 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2017)
All sky neutrino searches: Atmospheric neutrinos; Astrophysical neutrinos; Cosmegenic neutrinos; Submitted papers to the 32nd International Cosmic Ray Conference, Beijing 2011.
Dozens of high-energy neutrinos have been detected by the IceCube neutrino telescope, but no clear association with any classes of astrophysical sources has been identified so far. Recently, Kadler et al. (2016) report that a PeV cascade-like neutrino event occurs in positional and temporal coincidence with a giant gamma-ray flare of the blazar PKS B1424-418. Since IceCube track-like events have much better angular resolution, we here search for possible short-term gamma-ray flares that are associated with the IceCube track-like events with Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) observations. Among …
IceCube is the first representative of the km^3 class of neutrino telescopes and currently the most sensitive detector to high-energy neutrinos. Its main mission is to search for Galactic and extragalactic sources of high-energy neutrinos, but it is also an excellent detector for the investigation of a variety of other highly topical astrophysics and particle physics topics like supernovae, dark matter and neutrino oscillations. After an introduction to neutrino astronomy and neutrino telescopes, this article presents a selection of latest results from the IceCube neutrino detector with respec…
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…
Exotic particle searches: WIMPs annihilating in the Sun, in the galactic center, in nearby dwarf galaxies; magnetic monopoles; Submitted papers to the 32nd International Cosmic Ray Conference, Beijing 2011.
Searches for point sources of astrophysical neutrinos and related measurements: Searches for steady and time-variable sources; Follow-up programs; AGNs; GRBs; Moon shadow; Submitted papers to the 32nd International Cosmic Ray Conference, Beijing 2011.
Cosmic rays and related measurements: IceTop overview; IceTop calibration; Cosmic ray composition; Air shower measurements; Studies of cosmic ray muons; Studies of PeV gamma rays; Cosmic ray anisotropy; Forbush decrease; Submitted papers to the 32nd International Cosmic Ray Conference, Beijing 2011.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which instruments 1$\,$km$^3$ of clear ice at the geographic South Pole, was mainly designed to detect particles with energies in the multi-GeV to PeV range. Due to ice temperatures between $-20^\circ$C to $-43^\circ$C and the low radioactivity of the ice, the dark noise rates of the 5160 photomultiplier tubes forming the IceCube lattice are of order 500 Hz, which is particularly low for 10 inch photomultipliers. Therefore, IceCube can extend its searches to bursts of $\mathcal{O}$(10$\,$MeV) neutrinos lasting several seconds, which are expected to be produced…
The IceCube collaboration is building a cubic kilometer scale neutrino telescope at a depth of 2 km at the geographic South Pole, utilizing the clear Antarctic ice as a Cherenkov medium to detect cosmic neutrinos. The IceCube observatory is complemented by IceTop, a square kilometer air shower array on top of the in-ice detector. The construction of the detector is nearly finished with 79 of a planned 86 strings and 73 of 80 IceTop stations deployed. Its completion is expected in the winter 2010/11. Using data from the partially built detector, we present initial results of searches for neutri…
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory opened the window on neutrino astronomy by discovering high-energy astrophysical neutrinos in 2013 and identifying the first compelling astrophysical neutrino source, the blazar TXS0506+056, in 2017. In this talk, we will discuss the science reach and ongoing development of the IceCube-Gen2 facility---a planned extension to IceCube. IceCube-Gen2 will increase the rate of observed cosmic neutrinos by an order of magnitude, be able to detect five-times fainter neutrino sources, and extend the measurement of astrophysical neutrinos several orders of magnitude high…
Since the end of the eighties, in response to a reported increase of the total neutrino flux in the Homestake experiment in coincidence with solar flares, neutrino detectors have searched for signals of neutrinos associated with solar flare activity. Protons which are accelerated by the magnetic structures of such flares may collide with the solar atmosphere, producing mesons which subsequently decay, resulting in neutrinos at O(MeV-GeV) energies. The study of such neutrinos would provide a new window on the underlying physics of the acceleration process. The sensitivity to solar flares of the…
The energy density of cosmic neutrinos measured by IceCube matches the one observed by Fermi in extragalactic photons that predominantly originate in blazars. This has inspired attempts to match Fermi sources with IceCube neutrinos. A spatial association combined with a coincidence in time with a flaring source may represent a smoking gun for the origin of the IceCube flux. In June 2015, the Fermi Large Area Telescope observed an intense flare from blazar 3C 279 that exceeded the steady flux of the source by a factor of forty for the duration of a day. We show that IceCube is likely to observe…
Instrumenting a gigaton of ice at the geographic South Pole, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has been at the forefront of groundbreaking scientific discoveries over the past decade. These include the observation of a flux of TeV-PeV astrophysical neutrinos, detection of the first astrophysical neutrino on the Glashow resonance and evidence of the blazar TXS 0506+056 as the first known astronomical source of high-energy neutrinos. Several questions, however, remain, pertaining to the precise origins of astrophysical neutrinos, their production mechanisms at the source and in Earth's atmosphere…
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…
Construction of the cubic-kilometer neutrino detector IceCube at the South Pole has been completed in December 2010. It forms a lattice of 5160 photomultiplier tubes monitoring a gigaton of the deep Antarctic ice for particle induced photons. The telescope is primarily designed to detect neutrinos with energies greater than 100 GeV from astrophysical sources. Beyond this astrophysical motivation IceCube is also a discovery instrument for the search for physics beyond the Standard Model. Owing to subfreezing ice temperatures, the photomultiplier dark noise rates are particularly low which opens…
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole is a multi-component detector capable of measuring the cosmic ray energy spectrum and composition from PeV to EeV, the energy region typically thought to cover the transition from galactic to extragalactic sources of cosmic rays. The IceTop array at the surface is sensitive to the electromagnetic part of the air shower while the deep in-ice array detects the high-energy (TeV) muonic component of air showers. IceTop's reconstructed shower size parameter, S$_{125}$, is unfolded into a high statistics all-particle energy spectrum. Furthermore, fo…
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory provides the opportunity to perform unique measurements of cosmic-ray air showers with its combination of a surface array and a deep detector. Electromagnetic particles and low-energy muons ($\sim$GeV) are detected by IceTop, while a bundle of high-energy muons ($\gtrsim$400 GeV) can be measured in coincidence in IceCube. Predictions of air-shower observables based on simulations show a strong dependence on the choice of the high-energy hadronic interaction model. By reconstructing different composition-dependent observables, one can provide strong tests of had…
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are among the most powerful events observed in our universe and have long been considered as possible sources of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, which makes them promising neutrino source candidates. Previous IceCube searches for neutrino correlations with GRBs focused on the prompt (main emission) phase of the GRB and found no significant correlation between neutrino events and the observed GRBs. This motivates us to extend our search beyond the prompt phase. We perform analyses looking for evidence of neutrino emission up to 14 days before and after the prompt phase of…
We present a model-independent interpretation of searches for dark matter annihilation in the Sun using an effective field theory approach. We identify a set of effective operators contributing to spin-dependent scattering of dark matter with protons in the non-relativistic limit and explore simple new physics models which would give rise to such operators. Using the limits on the spin-dependent scattering cross-section set by the IceCube collaboration in their search for dark matter annihilation in the Sun, we derive limits on effective couplings and corresponding masses of mediating particle…
The IceCube neutrino observatory is a 3D array of photodetectors installed in the Antarctic ice. It consists of 5,160 photomultiplier-tubes spread among 86 vertical strings making a total detector volume of more than a cubic kilometer. It detects neutrinos via Cherenkov light of charged relativistic particles from neutrino interactions with the detector volume. IceCube is, due to its size and photosensor spacing, particularly sensitive to high-energy neutrinos. In this analysis we search for dark matter that annihilates into a metastable mediator that subsequently decays into Standard Model pa…
Blazar jets are extreme environments, in which relativistic proton interactions with an ultraviolet photon field could give rise to photopion production. High-confidence associations of individual high-energy neutrinos with blazar flares could be achieved via spatially and temporally coincident detections. In 2017, the track-like, extremely high-energy neutrino event IC 170922A was found to coincide with increased $γ$-ray emission from the blazar TXS 0506+056, leading to the identification of the most promising neutrino point source candidate so far. We calculate the expected number of neutrin…
Recent results from IceCube regarding TXS 0506+056 suggest that it may be useful to test the hypothesis of multiple neutrino flares, where each flare is not necessarily accompanied by a corresponding gamma-ray flare. An untriggered, time-dependent, source-stacking search would be optimal for testing this hypothesis, however such an analysis has yet to be applied to the full duration of IceCube data. Here, we discuss one possible way of constructing such an analysis, with a global test statistic obtained by summing the individual test statistics associated with each signal-like flare in the sam…
Motivated by the observation of a $>290$ TeV muon neutrino by IceCube, coincident with a $\sim$6 month-long $γ$-ray flare of the blazar TXS 0506+056, and an archival search which revealed $13 \pm 5$ further, lower-energy neutrinos in the direction of the source in 2014-2015, we discuss the likely contribution of blazars to the diffuse high-energy neutrino intensity, the implications for neutrino emission from TXS 0506+056 based on multi-wavelength observations of the source, and a multi-zone model that allows for sufficient neutrino emission so as to reconcile the multi-wavelength cascade cons…
