Searches for Lower-Energy Astrophysical Neutrinos Using IceCube DeepCore

by Andrew Wang (Georgia Tech)

Tuesday 28 Oct 2025, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Brussels

E/3rd floor-E.349 - Seminar room (E.349) (Marc de Hemptinne (chemin du Cyclotron, 2, Louvain-la-Neuve))

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic kilometer neutrino telescope located at the South Pole instrumented within deep Antarctic ice. Recently, IceCube has reported evidence of TeV-scale neutrino emission from NGC 1068, a nearby Seyfert II galaxy, suggesting that active galactic nuclei could be potential sources of astrophysical neutrinos. Searches for time-dependent 10 GeV to 1 TeV astrophysical neutrino emission have been conducted. Naturally, an analysis focusing on lower energy steady-state neutrino emission from NGC 1068 is in order. Such a study is further motivated by the soft spectral index of NGC 1068; an extrapolation of the power-law spectrum reveals that most of its neutrino emission may fall within an energy range sensitive to a low-energy analysis. Another motivation stems from evidence of neutrino emission from the Galactic Plane. Although this emission is assumed to be diffuse, a fraction of the observed neutrinos could stem from a collection of yet unresolved point sources. To wit, Galactic Plane pion bump sources observed by Fermi-LAT demonstrate a low-energy soft gamma-ray spectrum, potentially capable of producing similarly soft and low-energy neutrino spectra. In this presentation, we present an overview of previous, current, and future astrophysical searches in IceCube that focus on lower energy neutrino emission. 

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