• DOI:10.22323/1.395.1130
• Corpus ID: 236155216

Searches for and Characterization of Astrophysical Neutrinos using Starting Track Events in IceCube

@article{Mancina2021SearchesFA,
  title={Searches for and Characterization of Astrophysical Neutrinos using Starting Track Events in IceCube},
  author={Sarah Mancina and Manuel Silva},
  journal={Proceedings of 37th International Cosmic Ray Conference — PoS(ICRC2021)},
  year={2021}
}

• S. Mancina, Manuel Silva
• Published 10 July 2021
• Physics
• Proceedings of 37th International Cosmic Ray Conference — PoS(ICRC2021)

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic kilometer-sized detector designed to detect neutrinos of astrophysical origin. However, muons created by cosmic rays interacting in the atmosphere pose a significant background for these astrophysical neutrinos particularly in the southern equatorial sky. Identifying neutrino events that start in the detector allows us to reduce the atmospheric muon component while retaining a high rate of starting neutrino events. The method presented today also rejects atmospheric neutrinos if they are accompanied by muons from the same cosmic ray shower, lowering the 50% purity threshold for astrophysical-to-atmospheric neutrinos from 100 TeV to 10 TeV at declinations less than -25°. We use 10% (burn sample) of 9.5 years IceCube data to demonstrate the status of this dataset. We outline a planned measurement of the diffuse neutrino flux inclusive of theoretical and detector systematic uncertainties. In addition, we discuss searches for neutrino point sources and diffuse galactic plane neutrino emission in the Southern sky and plans to release high astrophysical-purity real-time alerts to the multi-messenger community.