Astrophysical neutrino source searches in the southern sky from 1 to 100 TeV with starting muon tracks in IceCube

• Main Author: Sarah Mancina
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://zenodo.org/record/6805087; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6805087

In the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory, looking at well reconstructed track events from the southern sky results in an event sample filled with atmospheric muons and neutrinos created in cosmic ray air showers that dominate over a signal of astrophysical neutrinos. However, selecting from these events tracks that start inside the detector allows you to not only reject the muon background, but also the atmospheric neutrino background for neutrinos which are accompanied by muons from the same air shower. With this method, we present a dataset that is dominated by astrophysical neutrinos in the southern sky with energies from 1 TeV and above. In this poster, we will show how this selection improves the IceCube sensitivity to southern sky neutrino sources. Using starting tracks particularly increases sensitivity to sources that we expect to have softer power law spectral indices or cutoff energies. We also present a search for diffuse galactic plane neutrino emission showing improved sensitivity when compared to previous IceCube and ANTARES publications.