ANTARES-IceCube combined search for neutrino pointsources in the Southern Hemisphere

Giulia Illuminati,C Spiering

doi:10.1051/epjconf/201920702008

Giulia Illuminati, C Spiering

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201920702008

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Abstract

A search for cosmic neutrino point-like sources covering the Southern hemisphere is presented, using 9 years and 7 years of data from the ANTARES and IceCube neutrino telescopes, respectively. The advantageous field of view of ANTARES as well as the high statistics provided by IceCube are exploited to open a window in the Southern sky where the sensitivity to point-sources improves by a factor ~ 2 compared to individual analyses. An unbinned maximum likelihood method is used to search for a localised excess of muon events over the expected background. Before applying the method to the unblinded dataset, the sensitivity and discovery potential of the search are computed through dedicated pseudo-experiments.

Highlights

Neutrino telescopes can play a crucial role in investigating the physical properties of astrophysical high-energy emitters or in the possible discovery of new astrophysical sources
The data sample used in this analysis corresponds to all events from the Southern sky which were included in the latest published ANTARES point-source analysis [3], combined with the through-going track-like events used in the seven-year IceCube point-source search [4]
For the i-th event in the j-th sample, Bij indicates the value of the background probability density function (PDF), N j is the total number of events in the j-th sample, and nsj is the number of signal events fitted in the j-th sample

Summary

Introduction

Neutrino telescopes can play a crucial role in investigating the physical properties of astrophysical high-energy emitters or in the possible discovery of new astrophysical sources. The high-energy field is currently led by the IceCube [1] and ANTARES [2] experiments. The different characteristics of the two telescopes, in particular the larger instrumented volume of IceCube and the better visibility of the Southern sky for neutrino energies below 100 TeV of ANTARES, allow for a gain in sensitivity by combining the datasets from both experiments in a joint search for point-sources in the Southern Hemisphere.

Data sample

Analysis method

Expected performances

Conclusions