Every flare, everywhere : untriggered searches for astrophysical neutrino transients using data from the IceCube detector

Author / Creator

Luszczak, William, author

Available as

Online

Physical

Summary

Recent results from the IceCube collaboration regarding the blazar TXS 0506+056 suggest the presence of neutrino flares that are not temporally coincident with a significant corresponding gamma ray...

Recent results from the IceCube collaboration regarding the blazar TXS 0506+056 suggest the presence of neutrino flares that are not temporally coincident with a significant corresponding gamma ray flare. Such flares are particularly difficult to identify, as their presence must be inferred from the temporal distribution of neutrino data alone. While previously existing statistical methods fit for only the largest neutrino flare candidate at a particular location, this work introduces an extension to fit for the contributions from multiple flare candidates at once, thereby increasing the sensitivity to sub-threshold neutrino flares. The need for a multiple flare fit is further motivated by the increasing duration of the IceCube data available for analysis. In this work, this "multi-flare" method is applied to data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory using two different source catalogs to explore emission from candidates similar to TXS 0506+056. This method is additionally used to create a "multi-flare" skymap, describing the temporal variability of IceCube data at every point in the neutrino sky. These results can be used to place further constraints on potential populations of transient neutrino sources, serving as a complement to existing time-integrated and time-dependent methods.

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