English

The Next Generation of IceCube Realtime Neutrino Alerts

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2019-08-15 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

In 2016, IceCube initiated a system of public real-time alerts that are typically issued within one minute, following the detection of a neutrino candidate event that is likely to be of astrophysical origin. The goal of these alerts is to enable multi-messenger observations that may identify the neutrino source. Through January 31, 2019, a total of 20 public alerts have been issued, with many of them receiving follow-up observations across multiple wavelength bands. One alert in particular, IceCube-170922A, was found to be associated with a flaring gamma-ray blazar, TXS 0506+056. This was the first >3 sigma association of a high-energy neutrino with an electromagnetic counterpart. In 2019, the IceCube collaboration is introducing a new set of neutrino candidate selections that expand the alert program. These new selections provide two alert channels. A "Gold" channel will issue alerts for neutrino candidates at least 50% likely to be of astrophysical origin and is expected to deliver \sim10 alerts per year. Additionally a more frequent "Bronze" channel will provide \sim20 alerts per year for neutrino candidates that are between 30% and 50% likely to be of astrophysical origin. We present the neutrino event selections used to generate these alerts, the expected alert rates, and a description of the alert message.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.04884,
  title  = {The Next Generation of IceCube Realtime Neutrino Alerts},
  author = {Erik Blaufuss and Thomas Kintscher and Lu Lu and Chun Fai Tung},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.04884},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Presented at the 36th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2019). See arXiv:1907.11699 for all IceCube contributions