IceCube: An overview of physics results

Ignacio Taboada,C Spiering

doi:10.1051/epjconf/201920701002

Abstract

Cosmic rays and neutrinos are intimately related. And though TeVPeV astrophysical neutrinos have been observed, their sources and their relation to potential sources of cosmic rays remain unknown. Recently, the blazar TXS 0506+056 has been identified as a candidate neutrino source. In parallel, IceCube has conducted numerous searches for other potential neutrino neutrino sources. These proceedings are limited in scope, given the large breath of science results by IceCube: A description of the astrophysical neutrino flux; a review of the real-time program that enables multi-messenger follow-up of neutrinos; a summary of the observations of TXS 0506+056; a recap of the search for neutrino point sources with 7 years of IceCube data; an account of the tantalizing capabilities of IceCube and ANTARES to detect Milky Way neutrinos and a description of a method to identify Glashow resonance events.

Highlights

Four astronomical messengers enable the study of the non-thermal universe at the highest energies: gravitational waves, cosmic rays, gamma rays and neutrinos
Cosmic rays are the most challenging to use astronomically, as their directional information is lost when they are deflected by galactic and inter-galactic magnetic fields
The fact that there are blazars that are closer to Earth than TXS 0506+056 and that there some of these have a flux as strong as TXS 0506+056, has lead to the speculation that not all blazars are neutrino sources and that TXS 0506+056 is somehow special [7]

Summary

Introduction

Four astronomical messengers enable the study of the non-thermal universe at the highest energies: gravitational waves, cosmic rays, gamma rays and neutrinos. The discovery of an all-sky, isotropic flux of VHE neutrinos by IceCube and the recent observation of a neutrino source candidate, the blazar TXS 0506+056, are pushing neutrinos to the forefront of multi-messenger astrophysics. These proceedings summarize work presented at the VLVNT 2018 by the IceCube collaboration. For sufficiently large amounts of light, or photomultiplier tube charge, deposited by an event, the veto is very effective at filtering the intense down-going cosmic ray muon background. Both energy and direction are used to measure the astrophysical spectrum and distinguish signal from background. But at lower energies, and because the neutrino spectrum overshoots the extragalactic gamma ray background, neutrino sources may be gamma- and cosmic-ray-dark

IceCube’s realtime program

Search for neutrino point sources

A joint IceCube-ANTARES study of the galactic plane

Muons in hadronic showers

Findings

Other IceCube contributions at this conference