Crab Nebula flare: Upper limits from a neutrino search with IceCube
ATel #16413; Sam Hori (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Justin Vandenbroucke (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Marcos Santander (University of Alabama), Erik Balufuss (University of Maryland)
on 20 Jan 2024; 01:34 UT
Credential Certification: Justin Vandenbroucke (justin.vandenbroucke@wisc.edu)
Subjects: Neutrinos, Pulsar
The IceCube Collaboration (http://icecube.wisc.edu/) reports:
IceCube has performed a search for track-like muon neutrino events arriving from the direction of the Crab Nebula in response to a gamma-ray flare detected by Fermi LAT (ATel 16387). The search was performed with a 21 day time window (2023-12-10 12:00:00.0 UTC to 2023-12-31 12:00:00.0 UTC), during which IceCube was collecting good quality data.
For this search, we report a p-value of 1.0, consistent with background expectation. We accordingly derive a time-integrated muon-neutrino flux upper limit for this source of E^2 dN/ dE = 5.6 x 10^-2 GeV cm^-2 at 90% CL, under the assumption of an E^-2 power law. 90% of events IceCube would detect from a source at this declination with an E^-2 spectrum are approximately between 800 GeV to 850 TeV.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic-kilometer neutrino detector operating at the geographic South Pole, Antarctica. The IceCube realtime alert point of contact can be reached at roc@icecube.wisc.edu.
[1] IceCube Collaboration, R. Abbasi et al., ApJ 910 4 (2021).
