Searches for IceCube Neutrinos Coincident with Gravitational Wave Events

TL;DR

This paper reports on IceCube's searches for neutrinos coincident with gravitational wave events during LIGO-Virgo's O3 run, setting upper limits and outlining future multi-flavor neutrino search strategies.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive neutrino search results from IceCube during the O3 gravitational wave observing run, including multiple datasets and future plans.

Findings

Upper limits on neutrino flux from GW events

Sensitivity to all neutrino flavors across energy ranges

Plans for extended searches in future observing runs

Abstract

Searches for neutrinos from gravitational wave events have been performed utilizing the wide energy range of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. We discuss results from these searches during the third observing run (O3) of the advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors, including a low-latency follow-up of public candidate alert events in O3, an archival search on high-energy track data, and a low-energy search employing IceCube-DeepCore. The dataset of high-energy tracks is mainly sensitive to muon neutrinos, while the low energy dataset is sensitive to neutrinos of all flavors. In all of these searches, we present upper limits on the neutrino flux and isotropic equivalent energy emitted in neutrinos. We also discuss future plans for additional searches, including extending the low-latency follow-up to the next observing run of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detectors (O4) and analysis of gravitational wave (GW) events using a high-energy cascade dataset, which are produced by electron neutrino charged-current interactions and neutral-current interactions from neutrinos of all flavors.