Search for neutrino point sources with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

Abstract

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a kilometer-scale detector located at the South Pole. The full detector comprises 5,160 photomultipliers (PMTs) deployed among 86 strings from 1.5–2.5 km deep within the ice. The constructing phase started in the austral summer of 2004 and ended in December 2010 with the deployment of the last 7 strings that make up the full detector. In this proceeding we present the results of the time integrated and time dependent point source searches corresponding to the years from April 2008 to May 2010 with two different configurations of the IceCube detector (40 and 59 strings). In the northern sky the IceCube neutrino telescope is sensitive to point sources of neutrinos with E−2 spectra mainly in the TeV–PeV energy range. In the opposite hemisphere, due to the higher contamination of high-energy atmospheric muons, the detector is most sensitive to sources with harder spectra, which produce high fluxes of PeV to EeV energies. The combined sensitivity is about a factor ∼2.5 better than the previous 1-year limit. An overview of the sensitivity and discovery potential for the time integrated searches over three years of IceCube, from April 2008 to May 2011, is also shown.