The core collapse of a massive star in the Milky Way will produce a neutrino burst, intense enough to be detected by existing underground detectors. The AMANDA neutrino telescope located deep in the ...South Pole ice can detect MeV neutrinos by a collective rate increase in all photo-multipliers on top of dark noise. The main source of light comes from positrons produced in the CC reaction of anti-electron neutrinos on free protons
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. This paper describes the first supernova search performed on the full sets of data taken during 1997 and 1998 (215 days of live time) with 302 of the detector's optical modules. No candidate events resulted from this search. The performance of the detector is calculated, yielding a 70% coverage of the galaxy with one background fake per year with 90% efficiency for the detector configuration under study. An upper limit at the 90% c.l. on the rate of stellar collapses in the Milky Way is derived, yielding 4.3 events per year. A trigger algorithm is presented and its performance estimated. Possible improvements of the detector hardware are reviewed.
Neutrinos are elementary particles that carry no electric charge and have little mass. As they interact only weakly with other particles, they can penetrate enormous amounts of matter, and therefore ...have the potential to directly convey astrophysical information from the edge of the Universe and from deep inside the most cataclysmic high-energy regions. The neutrino's great penetrating power, however, also makes this particle difficult to detect. Underground detectors have observed low-energy neutrinos from the Sun and a nearby supernova, as well as neutrinos generated in the Earth's atmosphere. But the very low fluxes of high-energy neutrinos from cosmic sources can be observed only by much larger, expandable detectors in, for example, deep water or ice. Here we report the detection of upwardly propagating atmospheric neutrinos by the ice-based Antarctic muon and neutrino detector array (AMANDA). These results establish a technology with which to build a kilometre-scale neutrino observatory necessary for astrophysical observations.
We show new results from both the older and newer incarnations of AMANDA (AMANDA-1310 and AMANDA-II, respectively). These results demonstrate that AMANDA is a functioning, multipurpose detector with ...significant physics and astrophysics reach. They include a new higher-statistics measurement of the atmospheric muon neutrino flux and preliminary results from searches for a variety of sources of ultrahigh energy neutrinos: generic point sources, gamma-ray bursters and diffuse sources producing muons in the detector, and diffuse sources producing electromagnetic or hadronic showers in or near the detector.
We show new results from both the older and newer incarnations of AMANDA (AMANDA-B10 and AMANDA-II, respectively). These results demonstrate that AMANDA is a functioning, multipurpose detector with ...significant physics and astrophysics reach. They include a new higher-statistics measurement of the atmospheric muon neutrino flux and preliminary results from searches for a variety of sources of ultrahigh energy neutrinos: generic point sources, gamma-ray bursters and diffuse sources producing muons in the detector, and diffuse sources producing electromagnetic or hadronic showers in or near the detector.
We present new data taken with the AMANDA-II neutrino telescope array. The AMANDA-II upgrade was completed at the beginning of 2000. It significantly extends the sensitivity of the 10-string ...AMANDA-B10 detector to high- and ultrahigh-energy neutrino fluxes into regions of interest for probing current astrophysical models which remain unexplored by other experiments.
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