Search for Ultra-High Energy Tau Neutrinos in IceCube

Abstract

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the geographic South Pole was designed with the primary goal of discovering high energy neutrinos from astrophysical objects such as active galactic nuclei and gamma ray bursts. IceCube completed construction in 2010 and has been collecting data throughout the construction phase. IceCube is sensitive to all three flavors of neutrinos, each of which has a distinct topological signature within the detector. At sufficiently high energies, the tau neutrino signature is a “double bang” from the charged current interaction of the neutrino and the decay of the tau lepton. At high energies, the tau neutrino has negligible background and would be an intriguing astrophysical signature. A dedicated search for ultra-high energy tau neutrinos (340 TeV–200 PeV) was performed using data from the partial IceCube detector, yielding a 90% CL upper limit of $E_{\nu }^2{\Phi }_{90}\left({\nu }_x\right)<16.3\times {10}^{-8}\text{GeV}{\text{cm}}^{-2}{\text{sr}}^{-1}{\text{s}}^{-1}$ on a diffuse astrophysical flux of UHE neutrinos.