Measurement of the astrophysical diffuse neutrino flux in a combined fit of IceCube's high energy neutrino data

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of over 10 years of IceCube data, combining multiple detection channels with a novel modeling approach to precisely measure the diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux.

Contribution

It introduces a coherent modeling framework and a general purpose Monte Carlo simulation to improve the precision of astrophysical neutrino flux measurements.

Findings

First combined fit of multiple detection channels

Unprecedented precision in flux property measurement

Use of continuous detector response variation in simulations

Abstract

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has discovered a diffuse neutrino flux of astrophysical origin and measures its properties in various detection channels. With more than 10 years of data, we use multiple data samples from different detection channels for a combined fit of the diffuse astrophysical neutrino spectrum. This leverages the complementary information of different neutrino event signatures. For the first time, we use a coherent modelling of the signal and background, as well as the detector response and corresponding systematic uncertainties. The detector response is continuously varied during the simulation in order to generate a general purpose Monte Carlo set, which is central to our approach. We present a combined fit yielding a measurement of the diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux properties with unprecedented precision.