| Summary: | Neutrinos are weird, ghostly particles that have many intriguing properties. One of them is the fact that they can oscillate between different flavours, as they propagate through empty space. Neutrino oscillation phenomenon is particularly intriguing, because it cannot be explained completely by the Standard Model of particle physics, which is the best model physicists have come up with to describe the structure and properties of matter. This phenomenon might therefore be connected to yet undiscovered physics, which is an exciting prospect. In this thesis the IceCube neutrino observatory, a large cubic-kilometer of instrumented ice located at the South Pole, is used to precisely measure the number of tau-flavoured neutrinos generated by the oscillation of muon and electron neutrinos produced in the Earth's atmosphere. Observing a significant deviation from the expected number of tau neutrinos could indicate the existence of a new type of particle taking part in oscillations, or the presence of new physics interactions. Neutrino data from the same experiment can also be used to look at astrophysical neutrinos coming from outer space. This thesis also presents a search for correlations between neutrinos detected in IceCube, and the distribution of galaxies in our "local" universe (where local means within ~1.6 billion light years from us).
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