Search for spatial coincidence between IceCube neutrinos and radio pulsars

Abstract

We search for a spatial association between radio pulsars and ultra-high energy neutrinos using the publicly available IceCube point source neutrino events catalog. For this purpose we use the unbinned maximum likelihood method to search for a statistically significant excess from each of the pulsars in the ATNF catalog. We do not find any pulsars with detection significance much higher than that expected from a Gaussian distribution, Therefore, we conclude that none of the currently known pulsars contribute to the diffuse neutrino flux detected by IceCube.

A stacked search for spatial coincidences between IceCube neutrinos and radio pulsars

“…PSR B1509-58 showed a statistically significant excess of spatial coincidence corresponding to 2.6σ significance [28]. Nevertheless, we could not confirm this excess with the IceCube 10-year muon track data [29]. The total diffuse neutrino flux of all pulsars using the mechanism proposed in [23] was estimated to be ∼ 10 −7 GeVcm −2 s 1 sr −1 [30].…”

“…Nevertheless, the pulsar emission mechanism is still not completely understood [33], and there could be other mechanisms of neutrino production hitherto undiscovered. Hence, it is imperative to carry out a search for neutrino emission from pulsars, which motivated our previous search [29] for spatial coincidences between IceCube neutrinos and radio pulsars located in our galaxy using the 10-year publicly available IceCube muon track data [3]. However, we could not detect any statistically significant neutrino emission from PSR B1509-58 or any other pulsar [29].…”

“…Hence, it is imperative to carry out a search for neutrino emission from pulsars, which motivated our previous search [29] for spatial coincidences between IceCube neutrinos and radio pulsars located in our galaxy using the 10-year publicly available IceCube muon track data [3]. However, we could not detect any statistically significant neutrino emission from PSR B1509-58 or any other pulsar [29]. Nevertheless, a stacked search from the combined pulsar population would enhance any putative signal to noise ratio, compared to a single source.…”

Search for GeV gamma-ray emission from SPT-SZ selected galaxy clusters with 15 years of Fermi-LAT data

“…The detection significance (or Z-score) is equal to √ TS. This TS statistic is also widely used in neutrino astrophysics to quantify the detection significance [74].…”

Dark Matter Search in Dwarf Irregular Galaxies with Ten Years of Data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

“…We process the 19 × 2 double-counted tracks in the data set found in (Zhou & Beacom 2022), following the procedure in (Chang et al 2022). 1 The analysis is performed by using an unbinned maximum likelihood ratio method (Braun et al 2008;Abbasi et al 2011;Aartsen et al 2013bAartsen et al , 2017aLi et al 2022;Pasumarti & Desai 2022). The likelihood function is defined as follows:…”