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Characterization of the astrophysical diffuse neutrino flux using starting track events in IceCube
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Characterization of the astrophysical diffuse neutrino flux using starting track events in IceCube

R. Abbasi, M. Ackermann, J. Adams, S. K. Agarwalla, J. A. Aguilar, M. Ahlers, J M Alameddine, N. M. Amin, K. Andeen, IceCube Collaboration, …
Physical review. D, Vol.110(2), 022001
2024
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.110.022001

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Abstract

A measurement of the diffuse astrophysical neutrino spectrum is presented using IceCube data collected from 2011-2022 (10.3 years). We developed novel detection techniques to search for events with a contained vertex and exiting track induced by muon neutrinos undergoing a charged-current interaction. Searching for these starting track events allows us to not only more effectively reject atmospheric muons but also atmospheric neutrino backgrounds in the southern sky, opening a new window to the sub-100 TeV astrophysical neutrino sky. The event selection is constructed using a dynamic starting track veto and machine learning algorithms. We use this data to measure the astrophysical diffuse flux as a single power law flux (SPL) with a best-fit spectral index of γ=2.58-0.09+0.10 and per-flavor normalization of φper-flavorAstro=1.68-0.22+0.19×10-18×GeV-1 cm-2 s-1 sr-1 (at 100 TeV). The sensitive energy range for this dataset is 3-550 TeV under the SPL assumption. This data was also used to measure the flux under a broken power law, however we did not find any evidence of a low energy cutoff.

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