Observation and Characterization of a Cosmic Muon Neutrino Flux from the Northern Hemisphere using six years of IceCube data

Understand

The IceCube Collaboration has previously discovered a high-energy astrophysical neutrino flux using neutrino events with interaction vertices contained within the instrumented volume of the IceCube detector.

• We present a complementary measurement using charged current muon neutrino events where the interaction vertex can be outside this volume.
• As a consequence of the large muon range the effective area is significantly larger but the field of view is restricted to the Northern Hemisphere.
• IceCube data from 2009 through 2015 have been analyzed using a likelihood approach based on the reconstructed muon energy and zenith angle.