Constraints on Galactic Neutrino Emission with Seven Years of IceCube Data

Abstract

The origins of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos remain a mystery despite extensive searches for their sources. We present constraints from seven years of IceCube Neutrino Observatory muon data on the neutrino flux coming from the Galactic plane. This flux is expected from cosmic-ray interactions with the interstellar medium or near localized sources. Two methods were developed to test for a spatially-extended flux from the entire plane, both maximum likelihood fits but with different signal and background modeling techniques. We consider three templates for Galactic neutrino emission based primarily on gamma-ray observations and models that cover a wide range of possibilities. Based on these templates and an unbroken $E^{-2.5}$ power-law energy spectrum, we set 90% confidence level upper limits constraining the possible Galactic contribution to the diffuse neutrino flux to be relatively small, less than 14% of the flux reported in Aartsen et al. (2015a) above 1 TeV. A stacking method is also used to test catalogs of known high energy Galactic gamma-ray sources.

14 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables, submitted to The Astrophysical Journal

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• Bounds on Long-lived Dark Matter Mediators from Neutron Stars
• Galactic diffuse gamma rays meet the PeV frontier
• Visible Decay of Astrophysical Neutrinos at IceCube
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• Identifying Galactic Sources of High-Energy Neutrinos
• Unveiling the nature of galactic TeV sources with IceCube results
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• All-sky neutrino point-source search with IceCube combined track and cascade data
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• Neutrino Astronomy 2017
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• Searching for a Galactic component in the IceCube track-like neutrino events
• Multi-messenger Implications of Sub-PeV Diffuse Galactic Gamma-Ray Emission
• Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter from Generalized $CPT$-Symmetric Early-Universe Cosmologies
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