Measurement of the energy spectrum of astrophysical muon-neutrinos with the IceCube Observatory
2021
The acceleration of high-energetic cosmic rays belongs to the fundamental
open questions of modern physics. In order to study the
mechanisms behind it and the astrophysical environments which
provide the enormous power required for the acceleration, it is
crucial to use complementary measurements, i.e. to investigate the
fluxes of different messenger particles that reach the Earth. Since
their first discovery in 2013, high-energetic astrophysical neutrinos
have been established as additional messengers. In this thesis, a
measurement of the cumulative flux of these neutrinos and of their
energy spectrum is presented.
Data has been collected with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory,
which instruments approximately one cubic kilometer of
glacial ice deep below the South Pole. Using more than 650.000
observed muon-track events from nearly ten years of operation,
an improved measurement of the astrophysical muon-neutrino
flux has been performed: The increased statistics compared to
previous publications (' 2 ) and an improved treatment of systematic
uncertainties lead to a more precise measurement of the
astrophysical flux properties. The observed energy spectrum can be
described by a power-law with normalization
+¯
@100TeV = 1.36+0.24
-0.25
10-18 GeV-1cm-2s-1sr-1 and spectral index
SPL = -2.37+0.08
-0.09.
Additionally, a wide range of other parameterizations for the energy
spectrum of the astrophysical neutrinos have been tested,
including model-independent approaches to enable an easy comparison
to theory predictions and other measurements. These tests
show first hints for spectral features beyond the single power-law:
The experimental data is better described by parameterizations
for the astrophysical neutrino spectrum with a changing slope, i.e.
with a steeper spectrum at highest energies.
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