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

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 s...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Collaboration, IceCube, Klein, Spencer
Other Authors: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Nuclear Science Division.
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 2009
Subjects:
79
Online Access:https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc933809/
Description
Summary: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.