First combined search for neutrino point-sources in the southern sky with the ANTARES and IceCube neutrino telescopes

J Barrios-Martí,C Finley

doi:10.1051/epjconf/201611604005

Abstract

A search for cosmic neutrino point-like sources using the ANTARES and IceCube neutrino telescopes over the Southern Hemisphere is presented. The ANTARES data were collected between January 2007 and December 2012, whereas the IceCube data ranges from April 2008 to May 2011. An unbinned maximum likelihood method is used to search for a localized excess of muon events in the southern sky assuming an E − 2 neutrino source spectrum. A search over a pre-selected list of candidate sources has also been carried out for different source assumptions: spectral indices of 2.0 and 2.5, and energy cutoffs of 1 PeV, 300 TeV and 100 TeV. No significant excess over the background has been found, and upper limits for the candidate sources are presented compared to the individual experiments.

Highlights

Neutrinos offer unique insight into the Universe due to the fact that they interact only weakly
A search for cosmic neutrino point-like sources using the ANTARES and IceCube neutrino telescopes over the Southern Hemisphere is presented
No statistically significant excess is found in the candidate source list search

Summary

Introduction

Neutrinos offer unique insight into the Universe due to the fact that they interact only weakly. The high-energy field is currently led by the IceCube [1] and ANTARES [2] experiments. While the instrumented volume of ANTARES is significantly smaller than that of IceCube, its geographical location provides a better view of the southern sky for neutrino energies below 100 TeV. The complementarity of the detectors for southern sky sources allows for a gain in sensitivity by combining the analysis of data from both experiments in a joint search for point sources. The improvement with this combination depends on the details of the fluxes, in particular the energy spectrum and a possible energy cut-off of the signal

Neutrino data samples

Search method

Results

Conclusion