RESULTS FROM THE AMANDA NEUTRINO TELESCOPE AND STATUS OF THE ICECUBE DETECTOR

S. HUNDERTMARK for the Amanda Collaboration Fysikum, Stockholms universitet, Roslagstullsbacken 21, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden

The Amanda neutrino telescope is installed in the 3 km thick Antarctic ice shield at the South Pole. Various strategies are used to search for signals from extraterrestrial high energy neutrino sources above the background caused by atmospheric neutrinos and muon bundles. A selection of results from these searches is presented. The construction of the next generation cubic-kilometer neutrino telescope IceCube has started. One string, carrying 60 optical modules was successfully installed and is taking data.

Motivation and Operation Principle

Neutrinos are unique astronomical messengers. Once produced, they travel undisturbed by matter or radiation elds along straight lines. This makes them ideal to locate the unknown sources of the high energy cosmic rays. In contrast to photons which can be produced both by accelerating electrons or protons, neutrinos are linked to proton acceleration via the interaction of the accelerated charged particles with ambient matter or photons. p + p() p(n) + and + Typically, models predict a generic neutrino energy spectrum following E 2 . The softer spectrum of the unavoidable atmospheric neutrinos enables the search for astrophysical neutrinos above a cross over energy. Optical Cherenkov neutrino telescopes use the secondary muon that is produced in a chargedcurrent interaction to detect the neutrinos. At high energies the angle between the neutrino and the muon is becoming suciently small (0.7 o at E =1 TeV) to use the detector as a telescope.

The advantage of the neutrino, to only interact weakly is also the biggest obstacle to its detection. Huge volumes need to be monitored to be able to detect the feeble ux expected from extraterrestrial neutrino sources. Running neutrino telescopes are deployed in volumes smaller than 0.02 km3 , but construction of one next generation detector covering 1 km 3 has started. The large range of muons, up to several tens of kilometers (> 20 km at PeV), considerably increases the eective volume of these open detectors at high energies. Neutrino telescopes look downward, using the Earth as lter that can only be passed by neutrinos. Muons coming from above are produced in atmospheric air showers and outnumber the neutrino induced upward moving muons by several orders of magnitude. At energies above O(PeV) the Earth becomes opaque even to neutrinos and the signal has to be searched for at and above the horizon. Apart from muon tracks, cascades caused by electron- or tau-neutrinos can be detected, leaving a specic signature in the detector. Their dierent topologies make avor identication possible, opening the eld of particle physics to neutrino telescopes 1 . 2 The Detector
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Figure 1: Schematic of the Amanda detector. The scale on the left hand side indicates the depth below the ice surface.

2.5 km, extending above and below the current Amanda detector. Up to 16 strings per season will follow until the detector is completed with a total of 4800 optical modules on 80 strings in the year 2010. This detector will contain the Amanda array as its high density core. The IceCube optical modules are more advanced than the Amanda optical modules. Equipped with an on-board processor, the signal is digitized in the ice. The more complex hardware allows for a large dynamic range of several thousand photo-electrons and a timing accuracy of a few nanoseconds. 3 Searches for a Diuse Neutrino Flux and Point Sources

The combined neutrino ux from distributed unresolved sources gives rise to a diuse ux of astrophysical neutrinos. This ux is larger than the ux from individual resolved sources, but the background rejection is more dicult than in point source searches. The backgrounds are muons

       

Hot water was used to drill the 2 km deep holes for the Amanda 2 detector in the 3 km thick Antarctic ice sheet. After the deployment the water slowly re-freezes, providing mechanical support to the detector. 677 optical modules distributed on 19 strings, are connected via cables to the surface. The detector was installed during the period 1996 to 2000. The equipped ice volume can be approximated by a cylinder of 500 m height and 200 m diameter. This sparseness can be aorded as the absorption length for photons of the relevant wavelength in the ice is quite long, about 100 m. The signals from the photo-multipliers are sent without further amplication or processing to the electronics housed at the surface. Figure 1 shows the detector and a sketch of an optical module. Construction of the much larger IceCube array 3 has started in January 2005. One string, carrying 60 optical modules distributed along 1 km of cable, was lowered down to a depth of

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and neutrinos, products of atmospheric air showers caused by cosmic ray nucleons. Amanda has searched for the diuse ux of neutrinos with energies from 50 TeV up to above EeV. Here a preliminary measurement of the energy spectrum of atmospheric neutrinos, the result of the search for ultra-high energy (UHE) neutrinos and one multi-year point source search is presented. 3.1 Atmospheric Neutrinos

-1 The measurement of atmospheric neutrinos is 10 a mandatory analysis. It is needed to estab-2 10 lish Amandas working as a neutrino telescope -3 10 and can be used to calibrate the detector. -4 Previously, the smaller Amanda-B10 detector 10 -5 was used to measure the angular distribution of 10 events, which was found to be consistent with -6 10 expectations from atmospheric neutrino simu-7 10 lations 4 . From the year 2000 data sample, 570 -8 atmospheric neutrino events were extracted, 10 containing an estimated background contami-9 10 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 nation of 4 events. A neural net, trained on simulated event samples was used to unfold the Figure 2: Atmospheric neutrino energy specenergy spectrum of these events 5 . Figure 2 trum unfolded from data taken with Amanda. shows the extracted spectrum (preliminary), which is consistent with an E2.7 energy dependence and previous measurements by Frejus 6 . The line (marked limit) in the 100300 TeV energy interval is the 90 % condence level limit on an additional neutrino ux following an E 2 energy dependence. Also shown are model predictions for the horizontal (upper) and the vertical (lower line) atmospheric neutrino ux 7 . This is the rst measured atmospheric neutrino spectrum in the range from 1300 TeV.

3.2

UHE Analysis
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At energies above PeV the Earth is becoming opaque to neutrinos and only downward to hor3 Experiment 10 izontally traveling neutrinos can be detected. w. CORSIKA The limited overburden above Amanda con2 10 centrates the signal at the horizon. This signal has to be searched for in the large background of down-going muon bundles. The primary 10 cosmic ray spectrum rapidly falls with energy (E3 ); at UHE only a small fraction of the 1 primary energy is transfered to muons. Therefore, neutrino induced events deposit more energy in the ice, which is converted to Cherenkov 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 NN2 photons, than muons induced by cosmic ray Figure 3: Neural net results for experimental primaries of the same energy. Analysis of data data and prediction from the air shower simutaken in 1997 shows that a background at the lation. Superimposed, neutrino induced events 9 cosmic ray events can be suciently level of 10 from an equally mixed all avor neutrino ux rejected to search for a diuse UHE neutrino of E2 (E )=106 GeV cm2 s1 sr1 . signal. Simple selection criteria reduced the data set to 3326 experimental events. A neural net was trained to separate background from signal events. Figure 3 shows the distribution of the neural net output for the experimental events compared to a prediction from simulations of

297651 events. The experimental and simulated data show good agreement, both in absolute number of events and in shape. Also shown is the number of events expected for a neutrino ux (all avors equally mixed) of E2 (E )=106 GeV cm2 s1 sr1 . Selecting events in the rightmost bin and including systematic uncertainties of 40 % (mostly from the uncertainty in describing the photon propagation in ice), a limit at 90 % condence level of E 2 (1015 eV<E <31018 eV)= 0.99106 GeV cm2 s1 sr1 is set 8 . 3.3 Point Source Search
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Extending a previously published analysis 9 , four years of data (20002003) were combined to a total live-time of 807 days. The selection resulted in 3329 up-going neutrino candidates in good agreement with the expectation from atmospheric neutrino simulations (3438 events). Figure 4 shows the distribution of the arrival direction of the events, revealing no signicant clustering which would correspond to a point source of extraterrestrial neutrinos. Searching for a signal from a steady point source in a catalog of 33 predened objects re-

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Figure 4: Sky-plot of the events selected from

807 days of live-time taken during 20002003.

vealed no statistically signicant deviation from the background expectation, as well. Currently an accurate estimation of the systematic error is performed. 4 Conclusions and Perspectives

The Amanda detector has searched the sky for uxes of extraterrestrial high energy neutrinos over an energy range extending to above EeV. No diuse ux or point source could be identied, but the produced limits are excluding several models of astrophysical phenomena producing neutrinos. The successful operation of the Amanda detector laid the ground work for the cubickilometer IceCube detector. The rst string was successfully deployed in January 2005 and data taking has started. Deployment will continue during the Antarctic summer seasons until the full detector is commissioned in 2010. Already next year the IceCube detector should number as many optical modules as the Amanda detector. References T. Han and D. Hooper, New J. Phys. 6 (2004) 150 http://amanda.uci.edu http://icecube.wisc.edu J. Ahrens et al., Phys. Rev. D 66 (2002) 012005. K. Woschnagg et al., Nuc. Phys. B (Proceedings Supplements) 143 (2005) 343-350. K. Daum et al., Zeitschrift f r Physik C 66 (1995) 417. u L. V. Volkova and G. T. Zatsepin, Sov. J Nucl. Phys. 31 (1980) 212. M. Honda et al., Phys. Rev. D 52 (1995) 4985. 8. M. Ackermann et al., Astropart. Phys. 22 (2005) 339353. 9. M. Ackermann et al., Phys. Rev. D 71 (2005) 077102. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.