Search for Astrophysical Tau Neutrinos in Three Years of IceCube Data

Abstract

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has observed a diffuse flux of TeV-PeV astrophysical neutrinos at 5.7σ significance from an all-flavor search. The direct detection of tau neutrinos in this flux has yet to occur. Tau neutrinos become distinguishable from other flavors in IceCube at energies above a few hundred TeV, when the cascade from the tau neutrino charged current interaction becomes resolvable from the cascade from the tau lepton decay. This paper presents results from a dedicated search for tau neutrinos with energies between 214 TeV and 72 PeV. The analysis searches for IceCube optical sensors that observe two separate pulses in a single event - one from the tau neutrino interaction, and a second from the tau decay. This is the first IceCube tau neutrino search to be more sensitive to tau neutrinos than to any other neutrino flavor. No candidate events were observed in three years of IceCube data. For the first time, a differential upper limit on astrophysical tau neutrinos is derived around the PeV energy region, which is nearly three orders of magnitude lower in energy than previous limits from dedicated tau neutrino searches.

11 pages, 10 figures. Accepted by PRD. This replacement changes from the initial submission to include referees' comments. The impact of a softer astrophysical neutrino energy spectrum of E^{-2.5} is added; also addressed is the potential instrumental backgrounds from PMT afterpulses and late pulses. Correspondence should be addressed to D. L. Xu and D. R. Williams

References in corpus (12)

• A combined maximum-likelihood analysis of the high-energy astrophysical neutrino flux measured with IceCube
• Calculation of atmospheric neutrino flux using the interaction model calibrated with atmospheric muon data
• Prompt neutrino fluxes from atmospheric charm
• Flavor Composition and Energy Spectrum of Astrophysical Neutrinos
• Flavor Ratio of Astrophysical Neutrinos above 35 TeV in IceCube
• An improved limit to the diffuse flux of ultra-high energy neutrinos from the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Theoretically palatable flavor combinations of astrophysical neutrinos
• New Physics in Astrophysical Neutrino Flavor
• Neutrino Decays over Cosmological Distances and the Implications for Neutrino Telescopes
• High energy neutrino yields from astrophysical sources I: Weakly magnetized sources
• The natural parametrization of cosmic neutrino oscillations
• The first search for extremely-high energy cosmogenic neutrinos with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

Cited by in corpus (42)

• All-sky search for time-integrated neutrino emission from astrophysical sources with 7 years of IceCube data
• Detection of a particle shower at the Glashow resonance with IceCube
• Observation of an Unusual Upward-going Cosmic-ray-like Event in the Third Flight of ANITA
• Probing BSM Neutrino Physics with Flavor and Spectral Distortions: Prospects for Future High-Energy Neutrino Telescopes
• Double Bangs from New Physics in IceCube
• Testing decay of astrophysical neutrinos with incomplete information
• New Prospects for Detecting High-Energy Neutrinos from Nearby Supernovae
• Analysis of the 4-year IceCube high-energy starting events
• Sensitivity of Lepton Number Violating Meson Decays in Different Experiments
• Tau Neutrinos in the Next Decade: from GeV to EeV
• Visible Decay of Astrophysical Neutrinos at IceCube
• Echo Technique to Distinguish Flavors of Astrophysical Neutrinos
• Unitarity Bounds of Astrophysical Neutrinos
• Neutrinos and Cosmic Rays Observed by IceCube
• Multi-PeV Signals from a New Astrophysical Neutrino Flux Beyond the Glashow Resonance
• A Search for Neutrino Emission from Fast Radio Bursts with Six Years of IceCube Data
• Observation of Seven Astrophysical Tau Neutrino Candidates with IceCube
• A Multi-Component Model for the Observed Astrophysical Neutrinos
• One-point fluctuation analysis of the high-energy neutrino sky
• Search for Astrophysical Neutrinos from 1FLE Blazars with IceCube
• Icecube/DeepCore tests for novel explanations of the MiniBooNE anomaly
• Neutrino telescopes and high-energy cosmic neutrinos
• Probing active-sterile neutrino transition magnetic moment on coherent elastic solar neutrino-nucleus scattering
• Radiowave Detection of Ultra-High Energy Neutrinos and Cosmic Rays
• Flavors of Astrophysical Neutrinos with Active-Sterile Mixing
• Probing strong dynamics with cosmic neutrinos
• Independent quark/antiquark fragmentation to massive particles in proton-proton collisions
• Time-delayed neutrino emission from supernovae as a probe of dark matter-neutrino interactions
• The importance of observing astrophysical tau neutrinos
• From $D_s^{\pm }$ production asymmetry at the LHC to prompt ${\nu }_{\tau }$ at IceCube
• Sterile Neutrino Searches at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory
• First Search for High-Energy Neutrino Emission from Galaxy Mergers
• Distributions for tau neutrino interactions observed through the decay $\tau \to \mu {\nu }_{\tau }{\bar{\nu }}_{\mu }$
• Dark Matter and Fundamental Physics Searches with IACTs
• Selected results from IceCube
• Studying low-$x$ structure function models with astrophysical tau neutrinos: double bang, lollipop and sugardaddy topologies
• Study of a large array to detect ultra high energy tau-neutrino
• Neutrino Astronomy at High Energies - An Experimental Review
• New vistas in charm production
• Double Bangs at IceCube as a Window to the Neutrino Mass Origin
• Why not any tau double bang in Icecube, yet?
• Constraints on active-sterile neutrino transition magnetic moments from low-energy electronic recoils at direct detection experiments