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Register a new userCharacterization of the Atmospheric Muon Flux in IceCube
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Muons produced in atmospheric cosmic ray showers account for the by far dominant part of the event yield in large-volume underground particle detectors. The IceCube detector, with an instrumented volume of about a cubic kilometer, has the potential to conduct unique investigations on atmospheric muons by exploiting the large collection area and the possibility to track particles over a long distance. Through detailed reconstruction of energy deposition along the tracks, the characteristics of muon bundles can be quantified, and individual particles of exceptionally high energy identified. The data can then be used to constrain the cosmic ray primary flux and the contribution to atmospheric lepton fluxes from prompt decays of short-lived hadrons. In this paper, techniques for the extraction of physical measurements from atmospheric muon events are described and first results are presented. The multiplicity spectrum of TeV muons in cosmic ray air showers for primaries in the energy range from the knee to the ankle is derived and found to be consistent with recent results from surface detectors. The single muon energy spectrum is determined up to PeV energies and shows a clear indication for the emergence of a distinct spectral component from prompt decays of short-lived hadrons. The magnitude of the prompt flux, which should include a substantial contribution from light vector meson di-muon decays, is consistent with current theoretical predictions.
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In the near future the energy region above few hundreds of TeV may really be accessible for measurements of the atmospheric muon spectrum by the IceCube array. Therefore one expects that muon flux uncertainties above 50 TeV, related to a poor knowledge of charm production cross sections and insufficiently examined primary spectra and composition, will be diminished. We give predictions for the very high-energy muon spectrum at sea level, obtained with the three hadronic interaction models, taking into account also the muon contribution due to decays of the charmed hadrons.
We examine the uncertainty of the calculation of the atmospheric neutrino flux and present a way to reduce it using accurately measured atmospheric muon flux. Considering the difference of the hadronic interaction model and the real one as a variation of hadronic interaction, we find a quantitative estimation method for the error of the atmospheric neutrino flux calculation from the residual of the reconstruction of the atmospheric muon flux observed in a precision experiment, by the study of atmospheric neutrino and muon fluxes response to the variation of hadronic interaction. However, the efficiencty of this method is largely dependent on the observation site of the atmospheric muon flux, as the relation of the error of the atmospheric neutrino flux calculation and the residual of the reconstruction of the atmospheric muon flux is also largely dependent on the muon observation site, especially for the low energy neutrinos. We calculate several observation sites, near Kamioka at sea level, same but 2770m a.s.l.., Hanle India (4500m a.s.l.), and at Balloon altitude ($sim$ 32km). Then we estimate how stringently can the atmospheric muon reduce the error in the calculation of the atmospheric neutrino flux. We also discuss on the source of error which is difficult to reduce by only the observation of atmospheric muon.
The IceCube Collaboration has previously discovered a high-energy astrophysical neutrino flux using neutrino events with interaction vertices contained within the instrumented volume of the IceCube detector. We present a complementary measurement using charged current muon neutrino events where the interaction vertex can be outside this volume. As a consequence of the large muon range the effective area is significantly larger but the field of view is restricted to the Northern Hemisphere. IceCube data from 2009 through 2015 have been analyzed using a likelihood approach based on the reconstructed muon energy and zenith angle. At the highest neutrino energies between 191 TeV and 8.3 PeV a significant astrophysical contribution is observed, excluding a purely atmospheric origin of these events at $5.6,sigma$ significance. The data are well described by an isotropic, unbroken power law flux with a normalization at 100 TeV neutrino energy of $left(0.90^{+0.30}_{-0.27}right)times10^{-18},mathrm{GeV^{-1},cm^{-2},s^{-1},sr^{-1}}$ and a hard spectral index of $gamma=2.13pm0.13$. The observed spectrum is harder in comparison to previous IceCube analyses with lower energy thresholds which may indicate a break in the astrophysical neutrino spectrum of unknown origin. The highest energy event observed has a reconstructed muon energy of $(4.5pm1.2),mathrm{PeV}$ which implies a probability of less than 0.005% for this event to be of atmospheric origin. Analyzing the arrival directions of all events with reconstructed muon energies above 200 TeV no correlation with known $gamma$-ray sources was found. Using the high statistics of atmospheric neutrinos we report the currently best constraints on a prompt atmospheric muon neutrino flux originating from charmed meson decays which is below $1.06$ in units of the flux normalization of the model in Enberg et al. (2008).
We report the first measurement of the atmospheric electron neutrino flux in the energy range between approximately 80 GeV and 6 TeV, using data recorded during the first year of operation of IceCubes DeepCore low energy extension. Techniques to identify neutrinos interacting within the DeepCore volume and veto muons originating outside the detector are demonstrated. A sample of 1029 events is observed in 281 days of data, of which 496 $pm$ 66(stat.) $pm$ 88(syst.) are estimated to be cascade events, including both electron neutrino and neutral current events. The rest of the sample includes residual backgrounds due to atmospheric muons and charged current interactions of atmospheric muon neutrinos. The flux of the atmospheric electron neutrinos is consistent with models of atmospheric neutrinos in this energy range. This constitutes the first observation of electron neutrinos and neutral current interactions in a very large volume neutrino telescope optimized for the TeV energy range.
A search for high-energy neutrinos was performed using data collected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory from May 2009 to May 2010, when the array was running in its 59-string configuration. The data sample was optimized to contain muon neutrino induced events with a background contamination of atmospheric muons of less than 1%. These data, which are dominated by atmospheric neutrinos, are analyzed with a global likelihood fit to search for possible contributions of prompt atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos, neither of which have yet been identified. Such signals are expected to follow a harder energy spectrum than conventional atmospheric neutrinos. In addition, the zenith angle distribution differs for astrophysical and atmospheric signals. A global fit of the reconstructed energies and directions of observed events is performed, including possible neutrino flux contributions for an astrophysical signal and atmospheric backgrounds as well as systematic uncertainties of the experiment and theoretical predictions. The best fit yields an astrophysical signal flux for $ u_mu + bar u_mu $ of $E^2 cdot Phi (E) = 0.25 cdot 10^{-8} textrm{GeV} textrm{cm}^{-2} textrm{s}^{-1} textrm{sr}^{-1}$, and a zero prompt component. Although the sensitivity of this analysis for astrophysical neutrinos surpasses the Waxman and Bahcall upper bound, the experimental limit at 90% confidence level is a factor of 1.5 above at a flux of $E^2 cdot Phi (E) = 1.44 cdot 10^{-8} textrm{GeV} textrm{cm}^{-2} textrm{s}^{-1} textrm{sr}^{-1}$.
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