Determination of the Atmospheric Neutrino Flux and Searches for New Physics with AMANDA-II

• Main Authors: IceCube Collaboration, Klein, Spencer, Collaboration, IceCube
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: 79; ENERGY RANGE; ENERGY SPECTRA; LORENTZ INVARIANCE; MUON NEUTRINOS; NEUTRINOS; PHYSICS; QUANTUM DECOHERENCE; QUANTUM GRAVITY; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: http://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/962713; https://www.osti.gov/biblio/962713

The AMANDA-II detector, operating since 2000 in the deep ice at the geographic South Pole, has accumulated a large sample of atmospheric muon neutrinos in the 100 GeV to 10 TeV energy range. The zenith angle and energy distribution of these events can be used to search for various phenomenological signatures of quantum gravity in the neutrino sector, such as violation of Lorentz invariance (VLI) or quantum decoherence (QD). Analyzing a set of 5511 candidate neutrino events collected during 1387 days of livetime from 2000 to 2006, we find no evidence for such effects and set upper limits on VLI and QD parameters using a maximum likelihood method. Given the absence of evidence for new flavor-changing physics, we use the same methodology to determine the conventional atmospheric muon neutrino flux above 100 GeV.