11:00 am–12:00 pm ERC 401
Steve Sclafani (University of Wisconsin, Madison) "Mapping the Milky Way Galaxy in high-energy neutrinos"
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic-kilometer neutrino detector located at the geographic South Pole. Since the discovery of astrophysical neutrinos in 2013, evidence of two neutrino sources have been presented, but the majority of the flux remains unexplained. The Galactic plane of the Milky Way has been studied in every wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays. Within our Galaxy, high-energy neutrinos can be produced when cosmic rays interact at their acceleration sites and during propagation through the interstellar medium. I will present the first observation of the Galactic plane in high-energy neutrinos. Using a new sample of neutrinos with energies ranging from 500 GeV to multi-PeV, tests of a diffuse Galactic neutrino emission find a 4.5 sigma rejection of the background-only hypothesis. This observation was enabled by machine-learning techniques that improved the selection efficiency and angular resolution of cascade-like neutrino events in IceCube.
