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Preliminary Exam
Characterizing the Diffuse Astrophysical Neutrino Flux with Contained and Uncontained Cascades in IceCube
Date: Thursday, October 24th
Time: 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Place: 5280 Chamberlin Hall
Speaker: Zoe Rechav, Physics PhD Graduate Student
Abstract: Recently, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has reported a deviation from a single power law in the extragalactic diffuse neutrino flux. This deviation is primarily driven by the hardening of the low-energy flux below 30 TeV. However, uncertainties remain in many features of the neutrino flux across the energy spectrum, including but not limited to the characterization of the neutrino flux below 30 TeV, the flux bump at ~30 TeV, the flux dip at ~500 TeV, and the characterization of the neutrino flux above 10 PeV. A stronger constraint on the energy spectrum is needed to resolve these uncertainties.

The DNNCascades event selection is a neural network based, high statistics cascade-like dataset that was first used to detect high energy neutrinos in the Galactic plane. As well as contained cascades, the selection includes ~30% uncontained cascades – neutrinos with interaction vertices at the edge or outside of the detector instrumentation volume. The high statistics, contained and uncontained cascades event selection could be key to more tightly constraining the diffuse flux across the energy spectrum.

My work involves optimizing this unique event selection to bring into the diffuse neutrino physics space. Extensive work on updated atmospheric neutrino background modeling, systematics updates, and data/MC improvement will be discussed, as well as my intention to perform an astrophysical diffuse flux measurement that could resolve uncertain features of the astrophysical spectrum.
Host: Lu Lu
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