Establishing the astrophysical origin of a signal in a neutrino telescope

Abstract

Recently the IceCube collaboration has reported the observation of 28 contained events with a visible energy in the interval between 60 TeV and 1.5 PeV, and has argued that this detection is evidence, with a statistical significance of more than four standard deviations, for the existence of an astrophysical neutrino flux that accounts for a large fraction of the events. In this work we analyze the arguments that allow to identify a component of astrophysical origin in the high energy neutrino flux separating it from atmospheric neutrinos. An astrophysical origin for a large fraction of the IceCube contained events is the simplest and most natural explanation of the data but, conservatively, an atmospheric origin cannot yet be entirely ruled out. This ambiguity should soon be resolved.

25 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (8)

• First observation of PeV-energy neutrinos with IceCube
• Prompt neutrino fluxes from atmospheric charm
• Measurement of the atmospheric neutrino energy spectrum from 100 GeV to 400 TeV with IceCube
• The spectrum of high-energy cosmic rays measured with KASCADE-Grande
• Measurement of the Atmospheric ${\nu }_e$ flux in IceCube
• Proton and Neutrino Extragalactic Astronomy
• Atmospheric leptons, the search for a prompt component
• Cosmic Ray Energy Spectrum from Measurements of Air Showers

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Characterization of the Atmospheric Muon Flux in IceCube
• Decaying Leptophilic Dark Matter at IceCube
• The highest energy neutrinos: first evidence for cosmic origin
• Diffuse flux of galactic neutrinos and gamma rays
• Large Scale Anisotropy of Cosmic Rays and Directional Neutrino Signals from Galactic Sources
• IceCube Neutrino Events from Fermi Bubbles