Model-independent search for neutrino sources with the ANTARES neutrino telescope

Abstract

A novel method to analyse the spatial distribution of neutrino candidates recorded with the ANTARES neutrino telescope is introduced, searching for an excess of neutrinos in a region of arbitrary size and shape from any direction in the sky. Techniques originating from the domains of machine learning, pattern recognition and image processing are used to purify the sample of neutrino candidates and for the analysis of the obtained skymap. In contrast to a dedicated search for a specific neutrino emission model, this approach is sensitive to a wide range of possible morphologies of potential sources of high-energy neutrino emission. The application of these methods to ANTARES data yields a large-scale excess with a post-trial significance of 2.5$\sigma$. Applied to public data from IceCube in its IC40 configuration, an excess consistent with the results from ANTARES is observed with a post-trial significance of 2.1$\sigma$.

References in corpus (19)

• Evidence for High-Energy Extraterrestrial Neutrinos at the IceCube Detector
• Observation of High-Energy Astrophysical Neutrinos in Three Years of IceCube Data
• First observation of PeV-energy neutrinos with IceCube
• ANTARES: the first undersea neutrino telescope
• Observation and Characterization of a Cosmic Muon Neutrino Flux from the Northern Hemisphere using six years of IceCube data
• A combined maximum-likelihood analysis of the high-energy astrophysical neutrino flux measured with IceCube
• All-sky search for time-integrated neutrino emission from astrophysical sources with 7 years of IceCube data
• Atmospheric and Astrophysical Neutrinos above 1 TeV Interacting in IceCube
• Search for Cosmic Neutrino Point Sources with Four Years of Data from the ANTARES Telescope
• A Search for a Diffuse Flux of Astrophysical Muon Neutrinos with the IceCube 40-String Detector
• Searches for Point-like and extended neutrino sources close to the Galactic Centre using the ANTARES neutrino Telescope
• A Fast Algorithm for Muon Track Reconstruction and its Application to the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope
• Evidence for the Galactic contribution to the IceCube astrophysical neutrino flux
• First Search for Point Sources of High Energy Cosmic Neutrinos with the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope
• First combined search for neutrino point-sources in the Southern Hemisphere with the ANTARES and IceCube neutrino telescopes
• Neutrinos and Cosmic Rays Observed by IceCube
• Galactic and extragalactic contributions to the astrophysical muon neutrino signal
• ANTARES Constrains a Blazar Origin of Two IceCube PeV Neutrino Events
• Searches for clustering in the time integrated skymap of the ANTARES neutrino telescope