Improved Detection of Supernovae with the IceCube Observatory

Understand

The IceCube neutrino telescope monitors one cubic kilometer of deep Antarctic ice by detecting Cherenkov photons emitted from charged secondaries produced when neutrinos interact in the ice.

• The geometry of the detector, which comprises a lattice of 5160 photomultipliers, is optimized for the detection of neutrinos above 100 GeV.
• However, at subfreezing ice temperatures, dark noise rates are low enough that a high flux of MeV neutrinos streaming through the detector may be recognized by a collective rate enhancement in all photomultipliers.
• This method can be used to search for the signal of core collapse supernovae, providing sensitivity competitive to Mton neutrino detectors to a supernova in our Galaxy.