Dimuons in Neutrino Telescopes: New Predictions and First Search in IceCube

Abstract

Neutrino telescopes allow powerful probes of high-energy astrophysics and particle physics. Their power is increased when they can isolate different event classes, e.g., by flavor, though that is not the only possibility. Here we focus on a new event class for neutrino telescopes: dimuons, two energetic muons from one neutrino interaction. We make new theoretical and observational contributions. For the theoretical part, we calculate dimuon-production cross sections and detection prospects via deep-inelastic scattering (DIS; where we greatly improve upon prior work) and $W$-boson production (WBP; where we present first results). We show that IceCube should have $\simeq 130$ dimuons ($\simeq 6$ from WBP) in its current data and that IceCube-Gen2, with a higher threshold but a larger exposure, could detect $\simeq 620$ dimuons ($\simeq 30$ from WBP) in 10 years. These dimuons are almost all produced by atmospheric neutrinos. For the observational part, we perform a simple but conservative analysis of IceCube public data, finding 19 candidate dimuon events. Subsequent to our paper appearing, visual inspection of these events by the IceCube Collaboration revealed that they are not real dimuons, but instead arise from an internal reconstruction error that identifies some single muons crossing the dust layer as two separate muons. To help IceCube and the broader community with future dimuon searches, we include the updated full details of our analysis. Together, these theoretical and observational contributions help open a valuable new direction for neutrino telescopes, one especially important for probing high-energy QCD and new physics.

Minor changes; match the published version

References in corpus (28)

• The automated computation of tree-level and next-to-leading order differential cross sections, and their matching to parton shower simulations
• An Introduction to PYTHIA 8.2
• IceCube-Gen2: The Window to the Extreme Universe
• Neutrino Trident Production: A Powerful Probe of New Physics with Neutrino Beams
• Time-integrated Neutrino Source Searches with 10 years of IceCube Data
• The IceCube high-energy starting event sample: Description and flux characterization with 7.5 years of data
• The Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment
• Measurement of the multi-TeV neutrino cross section with IceCube using Earth absorption
• IceCube: An Instrument for Neutrino Astronomy
• Detection of a particle shower at the Glashow resonance with IceCube
• Neutrino Constraints on the Dark Matter Total Annihilation Cross Section
• Cosmic neutrino cascades from secret neutrino interactions
• Upper Bound on the Dark Matter Total Annihilation Cross Section
• Determining neutrino oscillation parameters from atmospheric muon neutrino disappearance with three years of IceCube DeepCore data
• Double Bangs from New Physics in IceCube
• Constraining Very Heavy Dark Matter Using Diffuse Backgrounds of Neutrinos and Cascaded Gamma Rays
• IceCube PeV-EeV Neutrinos and Secret Interactions of Neutrinos
• Testing decay of astrophysical neutrinos with incomplete information
• Probing Secret Interactions of Astrophysical Neutrinos in the High-Statistics Era
• Search for High-Energy Neutrino Emission from Radio-Bright AGN
• Neutrino-nucleus cross sections for W-boson and trident production
• The Strangest Proton?
• Searches for small-scale anisotropies from neutrino point sources with three years of IceCube data
• W-boson and trident production in TeV--PeV neutrino observatories
• Measurement of the high-energy all-flavor neutrino-nucleon cross section with IceCube
• Direct Detection of Supersymmetric Particles in Neutrino Telescopes
• Probing new physics with long-lived charged particles produced by atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos
• Propagation in the atmosphere of ultrahigh-energy charmed hadrons

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Snowmass 2021 whitepaper: Proton structure at the precision frontier
• Detector Requirements for Model-Independent Measurements of Ultrahigh Energy Neutrino Cross Sections
• Investigating the correlations between IceCube high-energy neutrinos and Fermi-LAT gamma-ray observations
• Discovering neutrino tridents at the Large Hadron Collider
• High-energy neutrinos from choked-jet supernovae: Searches and implications
• A stacked search for spatial coincidences between IceCube neutrinos and radio pulsars
• Double and multiple bangs at tau neutrino telescopes: A novel probe of sphalerons with cosmogenic neutrinos
• Final state radiation from high and ultrahigh energy neutrino interactions
• First Search for High-Energy Neutrino Emission from Galaxy Mergers
• Investigating the correlations between IceCube high-energy neutrinos and Fermi-LAT $\gamma$-ray observations. II
• Search for spatial coincidence between IceCube neutrinos and gamma-ray bright red dwarfs
• Search for Charm-quark Production via Dimuons in Neutrino Telescopes
• Predictions for dimuon production in high-energy neutrino-proton collisions using the color dipole model
• Search for spatial coincidence between magnetars and IceCube detected neutrinos
• Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics at Colliders