Astroparticle Seminar

Birth of neutrino astronomy - Recent Highlights from IceCube

Matthias Danninger

UBC

Neutrino astronomy covers twelve orders of magnitude in wavelength, from the MeV diffuse flux of past supernovae to the EeV flux of cosmogenic neutrinos produced in interactions of cosmic rays with microwave photons. The highest energy neutrinos observed to date exceed 1 PeV in energy, a regime of particular interest because the neutrinos should point back to the still enigmatic accelerators of the highest energy Galactic and extragalactic cosmic rays. This makes neutrinos a unique probe of the universe's highest-energy phenomena. IceCube is a 1 cubic kilometer neutrino detector built in the Antarctic ice at the South Pole. In this talk, I will present some highlights from the latest IceCube results, including analyses that lead to the recently reported evidence for high-energy extraterrestrial neutrinos. I will include the latest results on searches for Dark Matter with neutrinos and discuss our latest meausurements on neutrino oscillation of atmospheric neutrinos. Finally, I will discuss the proposed upgrade, PINGU, a high-density infill array which will be sensitive to atmospheric neutrinos with energies of a few GeV, and aims to address one of the most fundamental questions in particle physics - the determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy.