Dresden 2013 – scientific programme
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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik
T 89: Neutrinoastronomie 4
T 89.7: Talk
Wednesday, March 6, 2013, 18:15–18:30, HSZ-E03
Search for sterile neutrinos with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory — •Marius Wallraff, Denise Hellwig, Anne Schukraft, and Christopher Wiebusch — III. Physikalisches Institut, RWTH Aachen, D-52056 Aachen
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a 1 km3 Cherenkov detector located at the geographic South Pole. It records atmospheric muon neutrinos with unprecedented statistics of several ten thousand events per year on analysis level and has proven to be suitable for the observation of muon disappearance due to neutrino oscillations. If additional sterile neutrino states exist with mass differences in the order of a few eV, a disappearance of muon neutrinos in the energy range of a few TeV will occur due to matter effects. The survival probability depends on the energy and the path of the neutrino through the Earth and thus its zenith angle. The excellent statistics in the relevant range of energies and baselines make IceCube an ideal tool for testing models of one or more sterile neutrinos. This talk will give an overview of different oscillation signatures, will introduce a two-dimensional Likelihood method, and will show how IceCube can be sensitive to these oscillation effects, based on data taken with its 59-string configuration.