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The ANTARES Nine-Year Hunt for Neutrinos highlighted by AAS Nova

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The recently published ANTARES search for a diffuse flux of cosmic neutrinos was highlighted on the AAS Nova site, a feature of AAS journals, on January 31th, 2018. This website is designed to highlight some of the most interesting recent results being published in AAS journals, with the dual intent of gaining broader exposure for our authors, and providing astronomy researchers and enthusiasts with summaries of recent research across a wide range of astronomical fields.

This Highlight presents the results the ANTARES nine-year search for a diffuse cosmic neutrino flux, using both track-like and shower-like events, as shown in the figure below. Over nine years, ANTARES detected a total of 33 events above an energy cutoff of 20 TeV, whereas models predict it should have seen only 24 such events due to atmospheric particles.

ANTARES detections across different energy bins, for both track-like (left) and shower-like (right) events. Plot includes data (black), model for atmospheric events (blue), and two different models for cosmic events (red). Above an energy cutoff of 20 TeV (grey line), nine excess neutrinos are detected relative to the atmospheric model. [Albert et al. 2018].
As pointed out by the website, the “mild excess” of neutrinos detected by ANTARES is by no means a smoking gun, but the properties of this cosmic neutrino flux are consistent with those detected by IceCube, which is a very promising outcome. ANTARES will certainly improve this result in the near future.

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