High Energy Neutrino Astronomy at the South Pole

by Kael Hanson (Universite Libre de Bruxelles)

Monday 24 Mar 2014, 12:00 → 13:30 Europe/Madrid

IFAE Seminar room (IFAE)

Abstract: The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole Station is about to enter it’s 4th year of operation with the full 86 string array (IC86). Having analysed two years of data in the IC86 run configuration and 1 year of IC79 data (the run period from May 2010 - May 2013), the collaboration has extracted a sample of 37 events which reconstruct as being due to the interactions of high energy neutrinos inside the IceCube detector volume with visible deposited energies in the range 30 TeV to 2 PeV. This measurement is well in excess of an expected background of 8.4 events due to mis-identified cosmic ray muons and 6.6 events due to atmospheric neutrino background, yielding a 5.7 sigma discovery of an extraterrestrial flux of neutrinos. This talk will discuss this analysis and implications of the result, the design of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, and future plans for detector extensions to enable precision measurements of this flux.