Seasonal Variations of the Atmospheric Muon Neutrino Spectrum measured with IceCube

Abstract

This study presents an energy-dependent analysis of seasonal variations in the atmospheric muon neutrino spectrum, using 11.3 years of data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. By leveraging a novel spectral unfolding method, we explore the energy range from 125 GeV to 10 TeV for zenith angles between 90° to 110°, corresponding to the Antarctic atmosphere. Our findings reveal that the seasonal variation amplitude decreases with energy reaching ($-4.6\pm 1.1$)\% during Austral winter and increases ($+3.9\pm 1.2$)\% during Austral summer relative to the annual average at 10TeV. While the unfolded flux exceeds the model predictions by up to 30\%, the differential measurement of seasonal variations remains unaffected. The measured seasonal variations of the muon neutrino spectrum are consistent with theoretical predictions using the MCEq code and the NRLMSISE-00 atmospheric model.

Preprint submitted to EPJC

References in corpus (11)

• IceCube-Gen2: The Window to the Extreme Universe
• Observation and Characterization of a Cosmic Muon Neutrino Flux from the Northern Hemisphere using six years of IceCube data
• Improved Characterization of the Astrophysical Muon-Neutrino Flux with 9.5 Years of IceCube Data
• Uncertainties in Atmospheric Neutrino Fluxes
• Influence of hadronic interaction models and the cosmic ray spectrum on the high energy atmospheric muon and neutrino flux
• Observation of muon intensity variations by season with the MINOS Near Detector
• Cosmic-muon characterization and annual modulation measurement with Double Chooz detectors
• Measurement of the atmospheric ${\nu }_e$ and ${\nu }_{\mu }$ energy spectra with the ANTARES neutrino telescope
• DAEMONFLUX: DAta-drivEn MuOn-calibrated atmospheric Neutrino Flux
• Observation of Seasonal Variations of the Flux of High-Energy Atmospheric Neutrinos with IceCube
• Atmospheric muons and their variations with temperature