A search for muon neutrinos originating from dark matter annihilations in the Sun is performed using the data recorded by the ANTARES neutrino telescope from 2007 to 2012. In order to obtain the best ...possible sensitivities to dark matter signals, an optimisation of the event selection criteria is performed taking into account the background of atmospheric muons, atmospheric neutrinos and the energy spectra of the expected neutrino signals. No significant excess over the background is observed and 90% C.L. upper limits on the neutrino flux, the spin-dependent and spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross-sections are derived for WIMP masses ranging from 50 GeV to 5 TeV for the annihilation channels WIMP+WIMP→bb¯,W+W− and τ+τ−.
ABSTRACT The IceCube Neutrino Observatory accumulated a total of 318 billion cosmic-ray-induced muon events between 2009 May and 2015 May. This data set was used for a detailed analysis of the ...sidereal anisotropy in the arrival directions of cosmic rays in the TeV to PeV energy range. The observed global sidereal anisotropy features large regions of relative excess and deficit, with amplitudes of the order of 10−3 up to about 100 TeV. A decomposition of the arrival direction distribution into spherical harmonics shows that most of the power is contained in the low-multipole ( ≤ 4) moments. However, higher multipole components are found to be statistically significant down to an angular scale of less than 10°, approaching the angular resolution of the detector. Above 100 TeV, a change in the morphology of the arrival direction distribution is observed, and the anisotropy is characterized by a wide relative deficit whose amplitude increases with primary energy up to at least 5 PeV, the highest energies currently accessible to IceCube. No time dependence of the large- and small-scale structures is observed in the period of six years covered by this analysis. The high-statistics data set reveals more details of the properties of the anisotropy and is potentially able to shed light on the various physical processes that are responsible for the complex angular structure and energy evolution.
Using data recorded with the ANTARES telescope from 2007 to 2015, a new search for dark matter annihilation in the Milky Way has been performed. Three halo models and five annihilation channels, ...WIMP+WIMP→bb¯,W+W−,τ+τ−,μ+μ− and νν¯, with WIMP masses ranging from 50 GeVc2 to 100 TeVc2, were considered. No excess over the expected background was found, and limits on the thermally averaged annihilation cross-section were set.
A highly significant excess of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos has been reported by the IceCube Collaboration. Some features of the energy and declination distributions of IceCube events hint at ...a North/South asymmetry of the neutrino flux. This could be due to the presence of the bulk of our Galaxy in the Southern hemisphere. The ANTARES neutrino telescope, located in the Mediterranean Sea, has been taking data since 2007. It offers the best sensitivity to muon neutrinos produced by galactic cosmic ray interactions in this region of the sky. In this letter a search for an extended neutrino flux from the Galactic Ridge region is presented. Different models of neutrino production by cosmic ray propagation are tested. No excess of events is observed and upper limits for different neutrino flux spectral indices Γ are set. For Γ=2.4 the 90% confidence level flux upper limit at 100 TeV for one neutrino flavour corresponds to Φ01f(100 TeV)=2.0⋅10−17 GeV−1cm−2s−1sr−1. Under this assumption, at most two events of the IceCube cosmic candidates can originate from the Galactic Ridge. A simple power-law extrapolation of the Fermi-LAT flux to account for IceCube High Energy Starting Events is excluded at 90% confidence level.
Abstract
Gamma-ray bursts are thought to be sites of hadronic acceleration, thus neutrinos are expected from the decay of charged particles, produced in pγ interactions. The methods and results of a ...search for muon neutrinos in the data of the ANTARES neutrino telescope from four bright GRBs (GRB 080916C, GRB 110918A, GRB 130427A and GRB 130505A) observed between 2008 and 2013 are presented. Two scenarios of the fireball model have been investigated: the internal shock scenario, leading to the production of neutrinos with energies mainly above 100 TeV, and the photospheric scenario, characterized by a low-energy component in neutrino spectra due to the assumption of neutrino production closer to the central engine. Since no neutrino events have been detected in temporal and spatial coincidence with these bursts, upper limits at 90 per cent confidence level on the expected neutrino fluxes are derived. The non-detection allows for directly constraining the bulk Lorentz factor of the jet Γ and the baryon loading fp.
ABSTRACT Observation of a point source of astrophysical neutrinos would be a "smoking gun" signature of a cosmic-ray accelerator. While IceCube has recently discovered a diffuse flux of astrophysical ...neutrinos, no localized point source has been observed. Previous IceCube searches for point sources in the southern sky were restricted by either an energy threshold above a few hundred TeV or poor neutrino angular resolution. Here we present a search for southern sky point sources with greatly improved sensitivities to neutrinos with energies below 100 TeV. By selecting charged-current interacting inside the detector, we reduce the atmospheric background while retaining efficiency for astrophysical neutrino-induced events reconstructed with sub-degree angular resolution. The new event sample covers three years of detector data and leads to a factor of 10 improvement in sensitivity to point sources emitting below 100 TeV in the southern sky. No statistically significant evidence of point sources was found, and upper limits are set on neutrino emission from individual sources. A posteriori analysis of the highest-energy (∼100 TeV) starting event in the sample found that this event alone represents a 2.8 deviation from the hypothesis that the data consists only of atmospheric background.
A search for high-energy neutrino emission correlated with gamma-ray bursts outside the electromagnetic prompt-emission time window is presented. Using a stacking approach of the time delays between ...reported gamma-ray burst alerts and spatially coincident muon-neutrino signatures, data from the
Antares
neutrino telescope recorded between 2007 and 2012 are analysed. One year of public data from the
IceCube
detector between 2008 and 2009 have been also investigated. The respective timing profiles are scanned for statistically significant accumulations within 40 days of the Gamma Ray Burst, as expected from Lorentz Invariance Violation effects and some astrophysical models. No significant excess over the expected accidental coincidence rate could be found in either of the two data sets. The average strength of the neutrino signal is found to be fainter than one detectable neutrino signal per hundred gamma-ray bursts in the
Antares
data at 90% confidence level.
Dark matter which is bound in the Galactic halo might self-annihilate and produce a flux of stable final state particles, e.g. high energy neutrinos. These neutrinos can be detected with IceCube, a ...cubic-kilometer sized Cherenkov detector. Given IceCube's large field of view, a characteristic anisotropy of the additional neutrino flux is expected. In this paper we describe a multipole method to search for such a large-scale anisotropy in IceCube data. This method uses the expansion coefficients of a multipole expansion of neutrino arrival directions and incorporates signal-specific weights for each expansion coefficient. We apply the technique to a high-purity muon neutrino sample from the Northern Hemisphere. The final result is compatible with the nullhypothesis. As no signal was observed, we present limits on the self-annihilation cross-section averaged over the relative velocity distribution (σ.sub.Av) down to 1.9 x 10.sup.-23 cm.sup.3 s.sup.-1 for a dark matter particle mass of 700-1,000 GeV and direct annihilation into vbar.v. The resulting exclusion limits come close to exclusion limits from γ-ray experiments, that focus on the outer Galactic halo, for high dark matter masses of a few TeV and hard annihilation channels.
Despite dedicated research has been carried out to adequately map the distribution of the sperm whale in the Mediterranean Sea, unlike other regions of the world, the species population status is ...still presently uncertain. The analysis of two years of continuous acoustic data provided by the ANTARES neutrino telescope revealed the year-round presence of sperm whales in the Ligurian Sea, probably associated with the availability of cephalopods in the region. The presence of the Ligurian Sea sperm whales was demonstrated through the real-time analysis of audio data streamed from a cabled-to-shore deep-sea observatory that allowed the hourly tracking of their long-range echolocation behaviour on the Internet. Interestingly, the same acoustic analysis indicated that the occurrence of surface shipping noise would apparently not condition the foraging behaviour of the sperm whale in the area, since shipping noise was almost always present when sperm whales were acoustically detected. The continuous presence of the sperm whale in the region confirms the ecological value of the Ligurian sea and the importance of ANTARES to help monitoring its ecosystems.
A search for a neutrino signal from WIMP pair annihilations in the centre of the Earth has been performed with the data collected with the ANTARES neutrino telescope from 2007 to 2012. The event ...selection criteria have been developed and tuned to maximise the sensitivity of the experiment to such a neutrino signal. No significant excess of neutrinos over the expected background has been observed. Upper limits at 90% C.L. on the WIMP annihilation rate in the Earth and the spin independent scattering cross-section of WIMPs to nucleons σpSI were calculated for WIMP pair annihilations into either τ+τ−, W+W−, bb¯ or the non-SUSY νμν̄μ as a function of the WIMP mass (between 25GeV∕c2 and 1000GeV∕c2) and as a function of the thermally averaged annihilation cross section times velocity 〈σAv〉Earth of the WIMPs in the centre of the Earth. For masses of the WIMP close to the mass of iron nuclei (50GeV∕c2), the obtained limits on σpSI are more stringent than those obtained by other indirect searches.
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