The American Physical Society’s (APS) April Meeting 2014 is currently underway in Savannah, Georgia. The meeting, which began on Saturday, April 5th, and runs through Wednesday, April 8th, includes presentations from a number of researchers from the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC).
Postdoctoral researcher Naoko Kurahashi Neilson begins the meeting today with the plenary talk “Cosmic Neutrinos in the IceCube Detector.” Neilson, a corresponding author on the November 2013 Science publication “Evidence for High-Energy Extraterrestrial Neutrinos at the IceCube Detector,” will discuss the all-sky search for tau, muon, and electron neutrinos, an independent analysis observing muon neutrinos from the Northern Hemisphere, and future research into the sources of high-energy neutrinos.
Other WIPAC speakers today include graduate students Christopher Weaver and Jacob Feintzeig, both presenting analyses that build on the high-energy neutrino discovery. Using two years of detector data, Weaver will show results for a consistent signal of muon neutrino events with energies above 100 TeV, traveling upward through the Earth to interact with IceCube.
Weaver’s results, which are considered preliminary, independently confirm the observation of an astrophysical neutrino flux in the 2013 Science publication. In addition to his parallel talk, he will participate in an APS media webcast at 1:00pm today.
Feintzeig combines the muon neutrinos with the 28 high-energy events published in Science to analyze possible astrophysical neutrino emission sources in the galaxy. On April 5th, John Bahcall Fellow and WIPAC postdoctoral researcher Markus Ahlers discussed theoretical models and implications of astrophysical neutrinos. Frank McNally, a graduate student, presented an update on the study of anisotropy in cosmic ray arrival directions using data from IceCube and IceTop.
In addition, former WIPAC postdoctoral researcher Nathan Whitehorn will present today on a new measurement of high-energy neutrinos from beyond the atmosphere. The talk, which is part of his 2014 “Young Star” award, focuses on the properties of the observed astrophysical neutrino flux and its implications for our understanding of cosmic ray accelerators.