Atmospheric neutrino oscillations and tau neutrinos in ice

Understand

The main goal of the IceCube Deep Core Array is to search for neutrinos of astrophysical origins.

• Atmospheric neutrinos are commonly considered as a background for these searches.
• We show here that cascade measurements in the Ice Cube Deep Core Array can provide strong evidence for tau neutrino appearance in atmospheric neutrino oscillations.
• A careful study of these tau neutrinos is crucial, since they constitute an irreducible background for astrophysical neutrino detection.