Search for neutrinos from the direction of the Galactic Center with the IceCube neutrino telescope

• Main Author: Hülß, Jan-Patrick
• Other Authors: Wiebusch, Christopher
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Publikationsserver der RWTH Aachen University 2011
• Subjects: info:eu-repo/classification/ddc/530; Neutrino; Galaktischer Halo; Dunkle Materie; Milchstraßensystem; Astronomie; Physik; IceCube; galactic halo; dark matter; milky way; Milky Way; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://publications.rwth-aachen.de/record/64223; https://publications.rwth-aachen.de/search?p=id:%22RWTH-CONV-125557%22

The IceCube telescope located at the geographic South Pole is designed to detect neutrinos. Usually, IceCube uses the Earth as shield against the background of atmospheric muon events. This restricts the eld of view to the Northern hemisphere. At high energies (PeV scale) the background fades away and the observation of the Southern sky is possible, too. At lower energies, neutrino induced events from the Southern sky can be identied if the interaction vertex is within the detector volume. For the reconstruction and identication of the interaction vertex new algorithms are developed in this thesis. The reconstruction algorithms are based on the spatial distribution of the hits in the detector. These algorithms are utilized for a search for a neutrino signal from the direction of the Galactic Center with IceCube in the 40 string conguration. In this region neutrinos could be produced in interactions of accelerated Cosmic Ray protons or by the annihilation or decay of Dark Matter particles from the Galactic halo. The analysis observes no significant neutrino signal from the direction of the Galactic Center and limits are set to constrain the neutrinoux and the properties of Dark Matter. Finally, an outlook to the full IceCube Detector including DeepCore is presented. It is expected that the sensitivity will increase signicantly.