We report on the observation of two neutrino-induced events which have an estimated deposited energy in the IceCube detector of 1.04±0.16 and 1.14±0.17 PeV, respectively, the highest neutrino energies observed so far. These events are consistent with fully contained particle showers induced by neutral-current ν(e,μ,τ) (ν(e,μ,τ)) or charged-current ν(e) (ν(e)) interactions within the IceCube detector. The events were discovered in a search for ultrahigh energy neutrinos using data corresponding to 615.9 days effective live time. The expected number of atmospheric background is 0.082±0.004(stat)(-0.057)(+0.041)(syst). The probability of observing two or more candidate events under the atmospheric background-only hypothesis is 2.9×10(-3) (2.8σ) taking into account the uncertainty on the expected number of background events. These two events could be a first indication of an astrophysical neutrino flux; the moderate significance, however, does not permit a definitive conclusion at this time.
The muon and anti-muon neutrino energy spectrum is determined from 2000-2003 AMANDA telescope data using regularised unfolding. This is the first 3 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.
We present the first statistically significant detection of neutrino oscillations in the high-energy regime (> 20 GeV) from an analysis of IceCube Neutrino Observatory data collected in 2010-2011. This measurement is made possible by the low energy threshold of the DeepCore detector (∼ 20 GeV) and benefits from the use of the IceCube detector as a veto against cosmic ray-induced muon background. The oscillation signal was detected within a low-energy muon neutrino sample (20 -100 GeV) extracted from data collected by DeepCore. A high-energy muon neutrino sample (100 GeV -10 TeV) was extracted from IceCube data to constrain systematic uncertainties. Disappearance of low-energy upward-going muon neutrinos was observed, and the non-oscillation hypothesis is rejected with more than 5σ significance. In a two-neutrino flavor formalism, our data are best described by the atmospheric neutrino oscillation parameters ∆m 2 23 = (2.3 +0.6 −0.5 ) • 10 −3 eV 2 and sin 2 (2θ23) > 0.93, and maximum mixing is favored.
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