Search for GeV Neutrino Emission During Intense Gamma-Ray Solar Flares with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

Abstract

Solar flares convert magnetic energy into thermal and non-thermal plasma energy, the latter implying particle acceleration of charged particles such as protons. Protons are injected out of the coronal acceleration region and can interact with dense plasma in the lower solar atmosphere, producing mesons that subsequently decay into gamma rays and neutrinos at O(MeV-GeV) energies. We present the results of the first search for GeV neutrinos emitted during solar flares carried out with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. While the experiment was originally designed to detect neutrinos with energies between 10 GeV and a few PeV, a new approach allowing for a O(GeV) energy threshold will be presented. The resulting limits allow us to constrain some of the theoretical estimates of the expected neutrino flux.

28 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables

References in corpus (6)

• Measurement of Atmospheric Tau Neutrino Appearance with IceCube DeepCore
• Fermi-LAT Observations of High-energy Behind-the-limb Solar Flares
• The First Fermi-LAT Solar Flare Catalog
• High energy neutrinos from the Sun
• Measurements of the Time-Dependent Cosmic-Ray Sun Shadow with Seven Years of IceCube Data -- Comparison with the Solar Cycle and Magnetic Field Models
• Searches for neutrinos from cosmic-ray interactions in the Sun using seven years of IceCube data

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• First Search for High-Energy Neutrino Emission from Galaxy Mergers
• Neutrino events within muon bundles at neutrino telescopes
• Searching for sub-populations within the gamma-ray solar flares catalog: a graph-based clustering analysis
• Multi-detector approach to enhance the sensitivity of neutrino telescopes to low-energy astrophysical sources
• Distinguishing Dirac and Majorana Neutrinos: Resonant Spin-Flavor Precession of GeV-Scale Astrophysical Transients
• Identification of time-correlated neutrino clusters in populations of astrophysical transient sources
• Search for Solar Flare Neutrinos with the KamLAND detector