Search for sources of High-Energy neutrons with four years of data from the Icetop Detector
IceTop is an air-shower array located on the Antarctic ice sheet at the geographic South Pole. IceTop can detect an astrophysicalflux of neutrons from Galactic sources as an excess of cosmic-ray air showers arriving from the source direction. Neutrons are undeflected by the Galactic magneticfield an...
| Published in: | The Astrophysical Journal |
|---|---|
| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | unknown |
| Published: |
Institute of Physics
2016
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.3847/0004-637X/830/2/129 https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:90d649e2-422e-492d-b2bc-69ca072ca5a7 |
| Summary: | IceTop is an air-shower array located on the Antarctic ice sheet at the geographic South Pole. IceTop can detect an astrophysicalflux of neutrons from Galactic sources as an excess of cosmic-ray air showers arriving from the source direction. Neutrons are undeflected by the Galactic magneticfield and can typically travel 10(E/PeV)pc before decay. Two searches are performed using 4 yr of the IceTop data set to look for a statistically significant excess of events with energies above 10 PeV(10^16 eV) arriving within a small solid angle. The all-sky search method covers from−90°to approximately −50°in declination. No significant excess is found. A targeted search is also performed, looking for significant correlation with candidate sources in different target sets. This search uses a higher-energy cut(100 PeV) since most target objects lie beyond 1 kpc. The target sets include pulsars with confirmed TeV energy photon fluxes and high-mass X-ray binaries. No significant correlation is found for any target set. Flux upper limits are determined for both searches, which can constrain Galactic neutron sources and production scenarios. |
|---|