High-Energy Neutrino Scan of the Galactic Plane

Abstract

Various searches for galactic high-energy neutrino sources with the neutrino telescopes IceCube and AMANDA are presented. The analysis uses data collected during 2008-2009 when IceCube was half completed. With AMANDA as an integrated part of the detector, the performance of IceCube below 10 TeV is improved significantly, opening new possibilities to improve the search for soft-spectra neutrino sources. The presented work provided important input to the design of DeepCore, the low-energy extension of IceCube, since it has established that the sensitivity to galactic neutrino sources can be enhanced by the collection of a higher number of neutrino candidates in the 100 GeV to 10 TeV range despite the higher background in this region. IceCube’s currently best soft-spectra upper limits for the Galactic Plane, for six galactic sources and for the star-forming “Cygnus” region have been obtained in this work. The sensitivity improved by at least a factor two with respect to the predecessor analysis. During the realization of this data analysis, IceCube nearly doubled its instrumented volume from 40 to 79 strings, including the advanced low-energy array DeepCore. The entire preparatory work for an All-Sky point source analysis with the nearly full detector has been performed. This thesis concludes with an outlook on the potential of the analysis of the IceCube 79-strings data.