Evidence for a break in the spectrum of astrophysical neutrinos

Abstract

The announcement by the IceCube Collaboration of the observation of 53 astrophysical neutrino candidates in the energy range 0.03 \alt E_ν/PeV \alt 2 has been greeted with a great deal of justified excitement. Herein we provide fits of single and a broken power-law energy-spectra to these high-energy starting events (HESEs). By comparing our statistical results from fits to (background-free) shower HESE data with the spectral shape of muon neutrinos recently reported by the IceCube Collaboration, we show that there is (3 σ) evidence for a break in the spectrum of astrophysical neutrinos. After that we use the fitted result to predict the rate of Glashow events (in the ~ 6.3 PeV region) and double-bang tau neutrino events (in the PeV region) just at the threshold of IceCube detection.

To be published in PRD

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Cited by in corpus (24)

• Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays
• Invisible Neutrino Decay Resolves IceCube's Track and Cascade Tension
• A Comprehensive Approach to Tau-Lepton Production by High-Energy Tau Neutrinos Propagating Through Earth
• Astrophysical neutrinos flavored with Beyond the Standard Model physics
• Interpreting IceCube 6-year HESE data as an evidence for hundred TeV decaying Dark Matter
• A Combined Astrophysical and Dark Matter Interpretation of the IceCube HESE and Throughgoing Muon Events
• Visible Decay of Astrophysical Neutrinos at IceCube
• Update on decaying and annihilating heavy dark matter with the 6-year IceCube HESE data
• Decaying dark matter at IceCube and its signature on High Energy gamma experiments
• Probing decaying heavy dark matter with the 4-year IceCube HESE data
• Boosted Dark Matter and its implications for the features in IceCube HESE data
• Probing New Physics at Future Tau Neutrino Telescopes
• Probing dark matter signals in neutrino telescopes through angular power spectrum
• The Bright and Choked Gamma-Ray Burst Contribution to the IceCube and ANTARES Low-Energy Excess
• Use of ANTARES and IceCube data to constrain a single power-law neutrino flux
• Hunting the Glashow Resonance with PeV Neutrino Telescopes
• Neutrinophilic Dark Matter in the epoch of IceCube and Fermi-LAT
• IceCube's astrophysical neutrino energy spectrum from CPT violation
• Evidence for a Spectral Break or Curvature in the Spectrum of Astrophysical Neutrinos from 5 TeV--10 PeV
• Bump-hunting in the diffuse flux of high-energy cosmic neutrinos
• Probing strong dynamics with cosmic neutrinos
• Cutoff of IceCube Neutrino Spectrum due to t-channel Resonant Absorption by C$\nu$B
• Multi-messenger High-Energy Signatures of Decaying Dark Matter and the Effect of Background Light
• Inferring astrophysical neutrino sources from the Glashow resonance