No abstract

Evidence for an extraterrestrial flux of high-energy neutrinos has now been found in multiple searches with the IceCube detector. The first solid evidence was provided by a search for neutrino events with deposited energies 30 TeV and interaction vertices inside the instrumented volume. Recent analyses suggest that the extraterrestrial flux extends to lower energies and is also visible with throughgoing, ν µ-induced tracks from the Northern hemisphere. Here, we combine the results from six different IceCube searches for astrophysical neutrinos in a maximum-likelihood analysis. The combined event sample features high-statistics samples of shower-like and track-like events. The data are fit in up to three observables: energy, zenith angle and event topology. Assuming the astrophysical neutrino flux to be isotropic and to consist of equal flavors at Earth, the all-flavor spectrum with neutrino energies between 25 TeV and 2.8 PeV is well described by an unbroken power law with best-fit spectral index −2.50 ± 0.09 and a flux at 100 TeV of 6.7 +1.1 −1.2 • 10 −18 GeV −1 s −1 sr −1 cm −2. Under the same assumptions, an unbroken power law with index −2 is disfavored with a significance of 3.8 σ (p = 0.0066%) with respect to the best fit. This significance is reduced to 2.1 σ (p = 1.7%) if instead we compare the best fit to a spectrum with index −2 that has an exponential cutoff at high energies. Allowing the electron neutrino flux to deviate from the other two flavors, we find a ν e fraction of 0.18 ± 0.11 at Earth. The sole production of electron neutrinos, which would be characteristic of neutron-decay dominated sources, is rejected with a significance of 3.6 σ (p = 0.014%).

Results from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have recently provided compelling evidence for the existence of a high energy astrophysical neutrino flux utilizing a dominantly Southern Hemisphere data set consisting primarily of ν(e) and ν(τ) charged-current and neutral-current (cascade) neutrino interactions. In the analysis presented here, a data sample of approximately 35,000 muon neutrinos from the Northern sky is extracted from data taken during 659.5 days of live time recorded between May 2010 and May 2012. While this sample is composed primarily of neutrinos produced by cosmic ray interactions in Earth's atmosphere, the highest energy events are inconsistent with a hypothesis of solely terrestrial origin at 3.7σ significance. These neutrinos can, however, be explained by an astrophysical flux per neutrino flavor at a level of Φ(E(ν))=9.9(-3.4)(+3.9)×10(-19)  GeV(-1) cm(-2) sr(-1) s(-1)(E(ν)/100  TeV(-2), consistent with IceCube's Southern-Hemisphere-dominated result. Additionally, a fit for an astrophysical flux with an arbitrary spectral index is performed. We find a spectral index of 2.2(-0.2)(+0.2), which is also in good agreement with the Southern Hemisphere result.

We present results on searches for point-like sources of neutrinos using four years of IceCube data, including the first year of data from the completed 86 string detector. The total livetime of the combined data set is 1373 days. For an E −2 spectrum, the observed 90% C.L. flux upper limits are ∼10 −12 TeV −1 cm −2 s −1 for energies between 1 TeV and 1 PeV in the northern sky and ∼10 −11 TeV −1 cm −2 s −1 for energies between 100 TeV and 100 PeV in the southern sky. This represents a 40% improvement compared to previous publications, resulting from both the additional year of data and the introduction of improved reconstructions. In addition, we present the first results from an all-sky search for extended sources of neutrinos. We update the results of searches for neutrino emission from stacked catalogs of sources and test five new catalogs; two of Galactic supernova remnants and three of active galactic nuclei. In all cases, the data are compatible with the background-only hypothesis, and upper limits on the flux of muon neutrinos are reported for the sources considered.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory was designed primarily to search for high-energy (TeV-PeV) neutrinos produced in distant astrophysical objects. A search for 100 TeV neutrinos interacting inside the instrumented volume has recently provided evidence for an isotropic flux of such neutrinos. At lower energies, IceCube collects large numbers of neutrinos from the weak decays of mesons in cosmic-ray air showers. Here we present the results of a search for neutrino interactions inside IceCube's instrumented volume between 1 TeV and 1 PeV in 641 days of data taken from 2010-2012, lowering the energy threshold for neutrinos from the southern sky below 10 TeV for the first time, far below the threshold of the previous high-energy analysis. Astrophysical neutrinos remain the dominant component in the southern sky down to a deposited energy of 10 TeV. From these data we derive new constraints on the diffuse astrophysical neutrino spectrum, Φν = 2.06−18 Eν /10 5 GeV −2.46±0.12 GeV −1 cm −2 sr −1 s −1 for 25 TeV < Eν < 1.4 PeV, as well as the strongest upper limit yet on the flux of neutrinos from charmed-meson decay in the atmosphere, 1.52 times the benchmark theoretical prediction used in previous IceCube results at 90% confidence.