RECENT RESULTS FROM ICECUBE

High-energy neutrinos provide a new window onto many processes. Locally, high-rate detec-tion of atmospheric neutrinos allows probes of cosmic ray air shower physics and neutrino oscillations. Neutrinos may also be produced at the acceleration sites of the highest energy cosmic rays and in other ast...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: N. Whitehorn
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.686.3925
Description
Summary:High-energy neutrinos provide a new window onto many processes. Locally, high-rate detec-tion of atmospheric neutrinos allows probes of cosmic ray air shower physics and neutrino oscillations. Neutrinos may also be produced at the acceleration sites of the highest energy cosmic rays and in other astrophysical processes, such as WIMP annihilation, and the detec-tion of such particles would allow unique probes of these processes. Here we review recent results on these subjects obtained with the recently-completed IceCube neutrino detector, with emphasis on the recent observation of neutrinos at PeV energies. 1 IceCube The IceCube neutrino detector (Fig. 1), located at the geographic south pole, was designed primarily for detection of astrophysical sources of TeV-PeV neutrinos. These are expected to be produced in the sites of high energy cosmic ray acceleration 1, for example by one of the processes: p+ γ → pi+ +X → νµ + µ+ +X (1) p+ p → pi+ +X → νµ + µ+ +X (2) Although this paper focuses on astrophysical searches, process (2) is also responsible for high