Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

UC Irvine

UC Irvine Previously Published Works bannerUC Irvine

Improved measurements of the TeV-PeV extragalactic neutrino spectrum from joint analyses of IceCube tracks and cascades

et al.
Creative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
Abstract

The IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory has discovered the presence of a diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux at energies of TeV and beyond using neutrino induced muon tracks and cascade events from neutrino interactions. We present two analyses sensitive to neutrino events in the energy range 1 TeV to 10 PeV, using more than 10 years of IceCube data. Both analyses consistently reject a neutrino spectrum following a single power-law with a significance of >4σ in favor of a broken power law. We describe the methods implemented in the two analyses, the spectral constraints obtained, and the validation of the robustness of the results. Additionally, we report the detection of a muon neutrino in the medium energy starting events sample, or MESE, with an energy of 11.4-2.53+2.46 PeV, the highest energy neutrino observed by IceCube to date. The results presented here show insights into the spectral shape of astrophysical neutrinos, which has important implications for inferring their production processes in a multimessenger picture.

Many UC-authored scholarly publications are freely available on this site because of the UC's open access policies. Let us know how this access is important for you.