Double pulses and cascades above 2 PeV in IceCube

Abstract

IceCube collaboration has seen an unexpected population of high energy neutrinos compatible with an astrophysical origin. We consider two categories of events that can help to diagnose cosmic neutrinos: double pulse, that may allow us to clearly discriminate the cosmic component of tau neutrinos; cascades with deposited energy above 2 PeV, including events produced by electron antineutrinos at the Glashow resonance, that can be used to investigate the neutrino production mechanisms. We show that one half of the double pulse signal is due to the neutrinos spectral region already probed by IceCube. By normalizing to HESE data, we find that 10 more years are required to obtain 90% probability to observe a double pulse. The cascades above 2 PeV provide us a sensitive probe of the high energy tail of the neutrino spectrum and are potentially observable, but even in this case, the dependence on type of the source is mild. In fact we find that pp or pγ mechanisms give a difference in the number of cascades above 2 PeV of about 25 % that can be discriminated at 2σ in about 50 years of data taking.

20 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in EPJC

References in corpus (4)

• Energy dependent neutrino flavor ratios from cosmic accelerators on the Hillas plot
• Glashow resonance as a window into cosmic neutrino sources
• How precisely neutrino emission from supernova remnants can be constrained by gamma ray observations?
• The natural parametrization of cosmic neutrino oscillations

Cited by in corpus (13)

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• Testing decay of astrophysical neutrinos with incomplete information
• Astrophysical neutrinos flavored with Beyond the Standard Model physics
• Analysis of the 4-year IceCube high-energy starting events
• Echo Technique to Distinguish Flavors of Astrophysical Neutrinos
• Astrophysical Neutrino Production Diagnostics with the Glashow Resonance
• A Multi-Component Model for the Observed Astrophysical Neutrinos
• Probing New Physics at Future Tau Neutrino Telescopes
• The flavor composition of astrophysical neutrinos after 8 years of IceCube: an indication of neutron decay scenario?
• Neutrino telescopes and high-energy cosmic neutrinos
• Hunting the Glashow Resonance with PeV Neutrino Telescopes
• The importance of observing astrophysical tau neutrinos
• Inferring astrophysical neutrino sources from the Glashow resonance