IceCube Sterile Neutrino Searches

Speaker

Mr Benjamin Smithers (University of Texas at Arlington)

Description

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a gigaton-scale Cherenkov telescope frozen beneath the ice at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Spanning approximately a cubic kilometer, it has detected hundreds of thousands of neutrino events at energies ranging from a few GeV to hundreds of TeV. Its high event statistics and sensitivity to a wide range of energies have given it an unprecedented sensitivity to sterile-neutrino oscillation parameters. IceCube may also be poised to make a direct sterile-induced tau-appearance measurement via $\bar{\nu}_{\mu}\to\bar{\nu}_{s}\to\bar{\nu}_{\tau}$ matter-enhanced oscillations and provide further constraint to the $\theta_{24}$ and $\theta_{34}$ mixing angles. Here, ongoing IceCube work and results for both high and low-energy sterile neutrino oscilations analyses are presented, for both cascade and track event topologies.

Author

Mr Benjamin Smithers (University of Texas at Arlington)

Presentation materials