CRA Seminar: Steve Sclafani

Title: Search for Southern Sky Neutrino Sources with IceCube

Abstract: The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has measured a flux of astrophysical neutrinos. More recently, it has used muon-neutrino datasets to present evidence for one source, a flaring blazar known as TXS 0506+056. However, the sources responsible for the majority of the astrophysical neutrino flux remain elusive. Galactic sources and the galactic plane have long been hypothesized as potential neutrino sources, however searches in the southern sky are limited due to the high background of downgoing muons produced in the atmosphere. In this work we present a new neutrino dataset relying heavily on Deep-Neural-Networks (DNN) to select cascade events produced from neutral-current interactions of all flavors and charged-current interactions with flavors other than muon-neutrino. The speed of DNN based selections allows the event selection to be performed in near-realtime with a single GPU. Cascade events have reduced angular resolution when compared to muon-neutrino events, however the resulting dataset has a much lower energy threshold in the southern sky and a lower background rate. These benefits lead to an improved sensitivity to sources in the southern sky when compared to muon-neutrino datasets. This improvement is particularly promising for identifying galactic sources including the galactic plane itself.