High-energy neutrino astronomy: a glimpse of the promised land

Abstract

In 2012, physicists and astronomers celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the detection of cosmic rays by Viktor Hess. One year later, in 2013, there was first evidence for extraterrestrial highenergy neutrinos, i.e. for a signal which may contain key information on the origin of cosmic rays. That evidence is provided by data taken with the IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole. First concepts to build a detector of this kind have been discussed at the 1973 International Cosmic Ray Conference. Nobody would have guessed at that time that the march towards first discoveries would take forty years, the biblical time of the march from Egypt to Palestine. But now, after all, the year 2013 has provided us a first glimpse to the promised land of the neutrino universe at highest energies. This article sketches the evolution towards detectors with a realistic discovery potential, describes the recent relevant results obtained with the IceCube and ANTARES neutrino telescopes and tries a look into the future.

Constraints on the models of the origin of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos

“…New similar gamma-ray flares of the same blazar in 2016 were not accompanied by neutrino excesses at IceCube; this, however, does not contradict the predictions of the proposed models [98]. It was this observation by AMANDA which motivated [4] the development of a system of mutual neutrino and gamma-ray telescope alerts, which has been actively developing already in the IceCube era.…”

“…It is not the purpose of this review to discuss in detail the history of neutrino astronomy, nor to give a detailed technical description of the instruments at work, see Refs. [2,4,5] and references therein. Brief information about past, present, and emerging detectors, which may be useful in reading the rest of the review, can be found in Table 2.…”

“…Even within this framework, a review of the literature will be necessarily incomplete, for which the author apologizes in advance. Books and reviews [1][2][3][4][5][6] and others, that touch on a variety of aspects of highenergy neutrino astronomy, can be recommended to the reader.…”

Origin of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos: new results and prospects

“…Therefore, the key reliability factor of neutrino astrophysics is the unification of the efforts of different experiments, which use different methods and have different sensitivities to the Northern and Southern skies. Since 2013, these efforts are being developed [82,83] within the framework of the Global Neutrino Network 3 (GNN). Probably, the creation of focused thematic working groups, which would include representatives of different experiments, will allow one to advance much further in understanding astrophysical neutrino sources.…”