Pinpointing astrophysical bursts of low-energy neutrinos embedded into the noise

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to detect weak low-energy neutrino bursts from astrophysical sources by leveraging their temporal structure, significantly reducing false positives and improving detection capabilities across multiple detectors.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel temporal-structure-based detection method that enhances identification of astrophysical neutrino bursts and reduces background misidentification, applicable to multiple neutrino observatories.

Findings

Reduces misidentification probability by a factor of ~9 for Super Kamiokande at 200 kpc.

Improves background reduction by a factor of ~20 for Kamland & LVD at 75 kpc.

Enhances detection of weak neutrino signals without decreasing efficiency.

Abstract

We propose a novel method to increase the probability of identifying impulsive astrophysical bursts of low-energy neutrinos. The proposed approach exploits the temporal structure differences between astrophysical bursts and background fluctuations and it allows us to pinpoint weak signals otherwise unlikely to be detected. With respect to previous search strategies, this method strongly reduces the misidentification probability, e.g. for Super Kamiokande this reduction is a factor of $\sim 9$ within a distance of $D\sim 200$ kpc without decreasing the detection efficiency. In addition, we extend the proposed method to a network of different detectors and we show that the Kamland $\&$ LVD background reduction is improved by a factor $\sim 20$ up to an horizon of $D\sim75$ kpc.