A New Method for Finding Point Sources in High-energy Neutrino Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel maximum likelihood method utilizing pairwise angular separations to identify point sources of high-energy neutrinos more efficiently and accurately than existing techniques.

Contribution

The proposed method improves source detection sensitivity by incorporating angular resolution and pairwise data, reducing errors and computational costs compared to current approaches.

Findings

Reduces false positives and negatives with better angular resolution.

More computationally efficient for large datasets.

Effective for angular resolutions of a few degrees or better.

Abstract

The IceCube collaboration has reported the first detection of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos including $\sim 50$ high-energy starting events, but no individual sources have been identified. It is therefore important to develop the most sensitive and efficient possible algorithms to identify point sources of these neutrinos. The most popular current method works by exploring a dense grid of possible directions to individual sources, and identifying the single direction with the maximum probability of having produced multiple detected neutrinos. This method has numerous strengths, but it is computationally intensive and, because it focuses on the single best location for a point source, additional point sources are not included in the evidence. We propose a new maximum likelihood method that uses the angular separations between all pairs of neutrinos in the data. Unlike existing autocorrelation methods for this type of analysis, which also use angular separations between neutrino pairs, our method incorporates information about the point spread function and can identify individual point sources. We find that if the angular resolution is a few degrees or better, then this approach reduces both false positive and false negative errors compared to the current method, and is also more computationally efficient up to, potentially, hundreds of thousands of detected neutrinos.