Improved Detection of Supernovae with the IceCube Observatory

Abstract

The IceCube neutrino telescope monitors one cubic kilometer of deep Antarctic ice by detecting Cherenkov photons emitted from charged secondaries produced when neutrinos interact in the ice. The geometry of the detector, which comprises a lattice of 5160 photomultipliers, is optimized for the detection of neutrinos above 100 GeV. However, at subfreezing ice temperatures, dark noise rates are low enough that a high flux of MeV neutrinos streaming through the detector may be recognized by a collective rate enhancement in all photomultipliers. This method can be used to search for the signal of core collapse supernovae, providing sensitivity competitive to Mton neutrino detectors to a supernova in our Galaxy. An online data acquisition system dedicated to supernova detection has been running for several years, but its shortcomings include limited sampling frequency and the fact that the burst energy and direction cannot be reconstructed. A recently developed offline data acquisition system allows IceCube to buffer all registered photons in the detector in case of an alert with low probability to be erroneous. By analyzing such data offline, a precision determination of the burst onset time and the characteristics of rapidly varying fluxes, as well as estimates of the average neutrino energies may be obtained. For supernovae ending in a black hole, the IceCube data can also be used to determine the direction of the burst.

8 pages, 6 figures, contribution to the 8th international symposium on large TPCs for low-energy rare event detection, Paris, Dec. 5-7, 2016

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• Exciting Prospects for Detecting Late-Time Neutrinos from Core-Collapse Supernovae
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• Timing the Neutrino Signal of a Galactic Supernova
• Multimessenger Asteroseismology of Core-Collapse Supernovae
• Triangulation Pointing to Core-Collapse Supernovae with Next-Generation Neutrino Detectors
• Detectability of SASI activity in supernova neutrino signals
• Search for supernova bursts in Super-Kamiokande IV
• Combined Pre-Supernova Alert System with Kamland and Super-Kamiokande
• Prospects for detecting eV-scale sterile neutrinos from a galactic supernova
• IceCubes response to supernovae and periodic features in the count rates
• Individual Neutrino Masses From a Supernova