Detection of astrophysical tau neutrino candidates in IceCube
Date
2022-11-15
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The European Physical Journal C
Abstract
High-energy tau neutrinos are rarely produced in atmospheric cosmic-ray showers or at cosmic particle accelerators, but are expected to emerge during neutrino propagation over cosmic distances due to flavor mixing. When high energy tau neutrinos interact inside the IceCube detector, two spatially separated energy depositions may be resolved, the first from the charged current interaction and the second from the tau lepton decay. We report a novel analysis of 7.5 years of IceCube data that identifies two candidate tau neutrinos among the 60 “High-Energy Starting Events” (HESE) collected during that period. The HESE sample offers high purity, all-sky sensitivity, and distinct observational signatures for each neutrino flavor, enabling a new measurement of the flavor composition. The measured astrophysical neutrino flavor composition is consistent with expectations, and an astrophysical tau neutrino flux is indicated at 2.8σ significance.
Description
Please see publication for complete list of co-authors. This article was originally published in The European Physical Journal C. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-022-10795-y
Keywords
Citation
IceCube Collaboration., Abbasi, R., Ackermann, M. et al. Detection of astrophysical tau neutrino candidates in IceCube. Eur. Phys. J. C 82, 1031 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-022-10795-y