Searching for neutrinos from gravitational wave sources with IceCube

Author / Creator

Hussain, Raamis, Ph.D., author

Available as

Online

Physical

Summary

The discovery of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos by IceCube in 2013 and of gravitational waves by LIGO in 2015 have enabled a new era of multi-messenger astronomy. Gravitational waves (GWs) can...

The discovery of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos by IceCube in 2013 and of gravitational waves by LIGO in 2015 have enabled a new era of multi-messenger astronomy. Gravitational waves (GWs) can identify the merging of compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes. These compact mergers, especially neutron star mergers, are potential neutrino sources. Identifying joint sources of GWs and neutrinos would be a major breakthrough in multi-messenger astrophysics and allow us to understand the dynamics of compact binary mergers as well as understand the particle acceleration mechanisms taking place in these extreme environments. In this thesis we study the correlation between compact binary mergers and high-energy neutrino emission. We use IceCube neutrino data together with GW data provided by the LIGO Virgo Collaboration (LVC) to search for neutrino counterparts to GW events observed by LVC. We perform an unbinned maximum likelihood analysis which uses uses a neutrino likelihood along with localization information provided by LVC to search for joint sources of GWs and high-energy neutrinos. During LVC's three observing run, we followed up over 70 GW events with IceCube data. We also developed a low-latency pipeline capable of performing rapid neutrino follow up searches within minutes of a GW detection and report the results to the astronomical community. Overall we performed multiple follow up searches for both long and short time scale neutrino emission from GW events using multiple neutrino data samples. No significant neutrino emission is observed in any analysis and upper limits are placed on the time-integrated, energy scaled neutrino flux, E[^2]F, observed at IceCube from each GW event. We also place upper limits on the total isotropic equivalent energy, E[iso], emitted in high-energy neutrinos by each GW event. While no neutrino emission is observed in the analyses described here, the methods described here demonstrate the potential for discovering joint sources of GWs and high-energy neutrinos given enough high-quality neutrino and GW data.

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