Searches for High-Energy Neutrinos from the Sun

Abstract: While the Sun has already proved a fruitful laboratory for neutrino physics, high-energy solar neutrinos may continue to provide insight. For example, current-generation neutrino telescopes have searched for an excess of neutrinos from the Sun’s direction as evidence of annihilating weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) at energies from ~0.1 GeV to 10^4 GeV. Detection of these neutrinos would be a smoking-gun signature of WIMPs since backgrounds from the Sun are well-understood. Furthermore, there is a well-predicted but unmeasured flux of neutrinos created in cosmic-ray interactions with the solar atmosphere. Detecting this flux may shed light on the unexpected dip observed in the solar ring γ-ray spectrum. The IceCube Neutrino Telescope is a gigaton-scale neutrino telescope located between 1450m and 2450m beneath the geographic South Pole. The detector geometry makes it well-suited to carrying out such solar neutrino searches. In this seminar, I will present the status of IceCube’s ongoing solar WIMP and solar atmospherics searches and describe theoretical efforts to extend these searches.

Dates: 

Wednesday, 26 May, 2021 - 15:00

Localisation / Location: 

APC

Salle / Local: 

https://cnrs.zoom.us/j/93388438825
  • Séminaire

Nom/Prénom // Last name/First name: 

Jeffrey Lazar

Affiliation: 

University of Wisconsin, Madison - Harvard University

Equipe(s) organisatrice(s) / Organizing team(s): 

  • Particules

Pays / Country: 

USA