- June 7, 2021, 2:00 pm US/Central
- Jeffrey Lazar, Harvard
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.
For more information, please contact Yu-Dai Tsai at ytsaiATfnal.gov.