arXiv subjects

R. Engel

Publications and source records attributed to R. Engel.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

The IceCube Collaboration -- Contributions to the 39th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2025)

The IceCube Observatory at the South Pole has been operating in its full configuration since May 2011 with a duty cycle of about 99%. Its main component consists of a cubic-kilometer array of optical sensors deployed deep in the Glacial ice designed for the detection of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. A surface array for cosmic ray air shower detection, IceTop, and a denser inner subdetector, DeepCore, significantly enhance the capabilities of the observatory, making it a multipurpose facility. This list of contributions to the 39th International Cosmic Ray Conference in Geneva, Switzerland (July 15-24, 2025) summarizes the latest results from IceCube covering a broad set of key questions in physics and astrophysics. The papers in this index are grouped topically to highlight IceCube contributions related to high-energy neutrino and multi-messenger astrophysics, atmospheric fluxes, cosmic-ray physics, low-energy neutrino transients, physics beyond the Standard Model, detector calibration and event reconstruction, and the status and performance of the IceCube Upgrade, a dense sensor infill complemented by calibration devices to be deployed by the end of 2025. Contributions related to IceCube-Gen2, the planned future extension of IceCube, are available in a separate collection.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2025

The IceCube-Gen2 Collaboration -- Contributions to the 39th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2025)

IceCube-Gen2 is a planned next-generation neutrino observatory at the South Pole that builds upon the successful design of IceCube. Integrating two complementary detection technologies for neutrinos, optical and radio Cherenkov emission, in combination with a surface array for cosmic-ray air shower detection, IceCube-Gen2 will cover a broad neutrino energy range from MeV to EeV. This index of contributions to the 39th International Cosmic Ray Conference in Geneva, Switzerland (July 15-24, 2025) describes research and development efforts for IceCube-Gen2. Included are summaries of the design, status, and sensitivity of the IceCube-Gen2 optical, surface, and radio components; performance studies of next-generation surface detectors and in-ice optical sensors; advanced reconstruction techniques of cosmic-ray air showers and neutrino events; sustainability and environmental impact; and sensitivity studies of astrophysical neutrino fluxes and cosmic-ray physics. Contributions related to IceCube and the scheduled IceCube Upgrade are available in a separate collection.

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arXiv2025

Measurements of hadron production in 90 GeV/c proton-carbon interactions

This paper presents the multiplicity of neutral and charged hadrons produced in 90 GeV$/c$ proton-carbon interactions from a dataset taken by the NA61/SHINE experiment in 2017. Particle identification via dE/dx was performed for the charged hadrons $π^\pm$, $K^\pm$, and $p / \bar{p}$; the neutral hadrons $K^0_S$, $Λ$, and $\barΛ$ were identified via an invariant mass analysis of their decays to charged hadrons. Double-differential multiplicity results as a function of laboratory momentum and polar angle are presented for each particle species; these results provide vital constraints on the predicted neutrino beam flux for current and future long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments.

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arXiv2025

Search for High-Energy Neutrinos From the Sun Using Ten Years of IceCube Data

In this Letter, we present the results of a search for high-energy neutrinos produced by the annihilation of dark matter particles trapped in the Sun. Using 9.3 and 10.4 years of data from the DeepCore and IceCube neutrino detectors, we establish world-best limits for spin-dependent interactions between dark matter and Standard Model particles for dark matter masses from tens of GeV to tens of TeV. We additionally place constraints on the neutrino background produced by interactions of cosmic rays with the solar atmosphere.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2025

Proposal from the NA61/SHINE Collaboration for update of European Strategy for Particle Physics

Building on the current program's success and driven by new physics challenges, the NA61/SHINE Collaboration proposes to continue measuring hadron production properties in reactions induced by hadron and ion beams after CERN Long Shutdown 3. These measurements are of significant interest to the heavy-ion, cosmic-ray, and neutrino physics communities and will focus on: - Investigating hadron production in the light-ion systems to explore the diagram of high-energy nuclear collisions, and to obtain new insight into the unexpected violation of isospin (flavor) symmetry recently observed by the experiment; - Measuring charm-anticharm correlations to gain unique insights into the production locality of charm and anticharm quark pairs; - Examining strangeness and multi-strangeness production to improve our understanding of the early Universe's evolution and neutron star formation; - Measuring cross sections relevant for cosmic-ray measurements, significantly boosting searches for new physics in our Galaxy; - Conducting hadron production measurements with proton, pion, and kaon beams for neutrino physics, enhancing the precision of hadron production data needed for initial neutrino flux predictions in neutrino oscillation experiments; - Measuring hadron production processes relevant for understanding the flux of atmospheric neutrinos, as well as neutrinos and muons from spallation sources. To achieve these objectives, a detector upgrade and a beam upgrade are required, with data-taking planned for the period 2029-2032 and beyond.

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arXiv2025

Search for Extremely-High-Energy Neutrinos and First Constraints on the Ultrahigh-Energy Cosmic-Ray Proton Fraction with IceCube

We present a search for the diffuse extremely-high-energy neutrino flux using $12.6$ years of IceCube data. The nonobservation of neutrinos with energies well above $10 \, \mathrm{PeV}$ constrains the all-flavor neutrino flux at $10^{18} \, \mathrm{eV}$ to a level of $E^2 Φ_{ν_e + ν_μ+ ν_τ} \simeq 10^{-8} \, \mathrm{GeV} \, \mathrm{cm}^{-2} \, \mathrm{s}^{-1} \, \mathrm{sr}^{-1}$, the most stringent limit to date. Using these data, we constrain the proton fraction of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) above $\simeq 30 \, \mathrm{EeV}$ to be $\lesssim 70\,$% (at $90\,$% CL) if the cosmological evolution of the sources is comparable to or stronger than the star formation rate. This is the first result to disfavor the ``proton-only" hypothesis for UHECRs in this evolution regime using neutrino data. This result complements direct air-shower measurements by being insensitive to uncertainties associated with hadronic interaction models. We also evaluate the tension between IceCube's nonobservation and the $\sim 200 \, \mathrm{PeV}$ KM3NeT neutrino candidate (KM3-230213A), finding it to be $\sim 2.9 σ$ based on a joint-livetime fit between neutrino datasets.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2025

A Search for Millimeter-Bright Blazars as Astrophysical Neutrino Sources

The powerful jets of blazars have been historically considered as likely sites of high-energy cosmic-ray acceleration. However, particulars of the launched jet and the locations of leptonic and hadronic jet loading remain unclear. In the case when leptonic and hadronic particle injection occur jointly, a temporal correlation between synchrotron radiation and neutrino production is expected. We use a first catalog of millimeter (mm) wavelength blazar light curves from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope for a time-dependent correlation with twelve years of muon neutrino events from the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory. Such mm emission is known to trace activity of the bright jet base, which is often self-absorbed at lower frequencies and potentially gamma-ray opaque. We perform an analysis of the population, as well as analyses of individual, selected sources. We do not observe a significant signal from the stacked population. TXS 0506+056 is found as the most significant, individual source, though this detection is not globally significant in our analysis of selected AGN. Our results suggest that the majority of mm-bright blazars are neutrino dim. In general, it is possible that many blazars have lighter, leptonic jets, or that only selected blazars provide exceptional conditions for neutrino production.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2025

Measurement of the inelasticity distribution of neutrino-nucleon interactions for $\mathbf{80~GeV<E_ν<560~GeV}$ with IceCube DeepCore

We report a study of the inelasticity distribution in the scattering of neutrinos of energy $80-560$ GeV off nucleons. Using atmospheric muon neutrinos detected in IceCube's sub-array DeepCore during 2012-2021, we fit the observed inelasticity in the data to a parameterized expectation and extract the values that describe it best. Finally, we compare the results to predictions from various combinations of perturbative QCD calculations and atmospheric neutrino flux models.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2025

Probing the PeV Region in the Astrophysical Neutrino Spectrum using $ν_μ$ from the Southern Sky

IceCube has observed a diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux over the energy region from a few TeV to a few PeV. At PeV energies, the spectral shape is not yet well measured due to the low statistics of the data. This analysis probes the gap between 1 PeV and 10 PeV by using high-energy downgoing muon neutrinos. To reject the large atmospheric muon background, two complementary techniques are combined. The first technique selects events with high stochasticity to reject atmospheric muon bundles whose stochastic energy losses are smoothed due to high muon multiplicity. The second technique vetoes atmospheric muons with the IceTop surface array. Using 9 years of data, we found two neutrino candidate events in the signal region, consistent with expectation from background, each with relatively high signal probabilities. A joint maximum likelihood estimation is performed using this sample and an independent 9.5-year sample of tracks to measure the neutrino spectrum. A likelihood ratio test is done to compare the single power-law (SPL) vs. SPL+cutoff hypothesis; the SPL+cutoff model is not significantly better than the SPL. High-energy astrophysical objects from four source catalogs are also checked around the direction of the two events. No significant coincidence was found.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2025

Evidence of isospin-symmetry violation in high-energy collisions of atomic nuclei

Strong interactions preserve an approximate isospin symmetry between up ($u$) and down ($d$) quarks, part of the more general flavor symmetry. In the case of $K$ meson production, if this isospin symmetry were exact, it would result in equal numbers of charged ($K^+$ and $K^-$) and neutral ($K^0$ and $\overline K^{\,0}$) mesons in the final state. Here, we report results on the relative abundance of charged over neutral $K$ meson production in argon and scandium nuclei collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 11.9 GeV per nucleon pair. We find that the production of $K^+$ and $K^-$ mesons at mid-rapidity is $(18.4\pm 6.1)\%$ higher than that of the neutral $K$ mesons. Although with large uncertainties, earlier data on nucleus-nucleus collisions in the collision center-of-mass energy range $2.6 < \sqrt{s_{NN}} < 200$~\GeV are consistent with the present result. Using well-established models for hadron production, we demonstrate that known isospin-symmetry breaking effects and the initial nuclei containing more neutrons than protons lead only to a small (few percent) deviation of the charged-to-neutral kaon ratio from unity at high energies. Thus, they cannot explain the measurements. The significance of the flavor-symmetry violation beyond the known effects is 4.7$σ$ when the compilation of world data with uncertainties quoted by the experiments is used. New systematic, high-precision measurements and theoretical efforts are needed to establish the origin of the observed large isospin-symmetry breaking.

nucl-ex↗

arXiv2025

Search for Quantum Gravity Using Astrophysical Neutrino Flavour with IceCube

Along their long propagation from production to detection, neutrino states undergo quantum interference which converts their types, or flavours. High-energy astrophysical neutrinos, first observed by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, are known to propagate unperturbed over a billion light years in vacuum. These neutrinos act as the largest quantum interferometer and are sensitive to the smallest effects in vacuum due to new physics. Quantum gravity (QG) aims to describe gravity in a quantum mechanical framework, unifying matter, forces and space-time. QG effects are expected to appear at the ultra-high-energy scale known as the Planck energy, $E_{P}\equiv 1.22\times 10^{19}$~giga-electronvolts (GeV). Such a high-energy universe would have existed only right after the Big Bang and it is inaccessible by human technologies. On the other hand, it is speculated that the effects of QG may exist in our low-energy vacuum, but are suppressed by the Planck energy as $E_{P}^{-1}$ ($\sim 10^{-19}$~GeV$^{-1}$), $E_{P}^{-2}$ ($\sim 10^{-38}$~GeV$^{-2}$), or its higher powers. The coupling of particles to these effects is too small to measure in kinematic observables, but the phase shift of neutrino waves could cause observable flavour conversions. Here, we report the first result of neutrino interferometry~\cite{Aartsen:2017ibm} using astrophysical neutrino flavours to search for new space-time structure. We did not find any evidence of anomalous flavour conversion in IceCube astrophysical neutrino flavour data. We place the most stringent limits of any known technologies, down to $10^{-42}$~GeV$^{-2}$, on the dimension-six operators that parameterize the space-time defects for preferred astrophysical production scenarios. For the first time, we unambiguously reach the signal region of quantum-gravity-motivated physics.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2025

Multiplicity and net-electric charge fluctuations in central Ar+Sc interactions at 13A, 19A, 30A, 40A, 75A, and 150A GeV/c beam momenta measured by NA61/SHINE at the CERN SPS

This paper presents results on multiplicity fluctuations of positively and negatively charged hadrons as well as net-electric charge fluctuations measured in central Ar+Sc interactions at beam momenta 13A, 19A, 30A, 40A, 75A, and 150A GeV/c. The fluctuation analysis is one of the tools to search for the predicted critical point of strongly interacting matter. Results are corrected for the experimental biases and quantified using cumulant ratios. In most instances, multiplicity and net-charge distributions appear narrower than the corresponding Poisson or Skellam distributions. Cumulant ratios are compared with the EPOS1.99 model predictions, which provide a qualitative description that aligns with observations for positively and negatively charged particles. The obtained results are also compared to earlier NA61/SHINE results from inelastic p+p interactions in the same analysis acceptance.

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arXiv2025

Measurement of the inhomogeneity of the KATRIN tritium source electric potential by high-resolution spectroscopy of conversion electrons from $^{83m}$Kr

Precision spectroscopy of the electron spectrum of the tritium $β$-decay near the kinematic endpoint is a direct method to determine the effective electron antineutrino mass. The KArlsruhe TRItium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment aims to determine this quantity with a sensitivity of better than 0.3$\,$eV (90$\,$% C.L.). An inhomogeneous electric potential in the tritium source of KATRIN can lead to distortions of the $β$-spectrum, which directly impact the neutrino-mass observable. This effect can be quantified through precision spectroscopy of the conversion-electrons of co-circulated metastable $^{83m}$Kr. Therefore, dedicated, several-weeks long measurement campaigns have been performed within the KATRIN data taking schedule. In this work, we infer the tritium source potential observables from these measurements, and present their implications for the neutrino-mass determination.

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arXiv2025

Measurements of higher-order cumulants of multiplicity and net-electric charge distributions in inelastic proton-proton interactions by NA61/SHINE

This paper presents the energy dependence of multiplicity and net-electric charge fluctuations in p+p interactions at beam momenta 20, 31, 40, 80, and 158 GeV/c. Results are corrected for the experimental biases and quantified with the use of cumulants and factorial cumulants. Cumulant ratios are an essential tool in the search for the critical point of strongly interacting matter in heavy ion collisions. Measurements performed in p+p interactions provide a vital baseline estimation in these studies. The measured signals are compared with the string hadronic models EPOS1.99 and FTFP-BERT.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2025

Search for Heavy Neutral Leptons with IceCube DeepCore

The observation of neutrino oscillations has established that neutrinos have non-zero masses. This phenomenon is not explained by the Standard Model of particle physics, but one viable explanation to this dilemma involves the existence of heavy neutral leptons in the form of right-handed neutrinos. This work presents the first search for heavy neutral leptons with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. The standard three flavor neutrino model is extended by adding a fourth GeV-scale mass state allowing mixing with the $τ$ sector through the parameter $|U_{\tau4}|^2$. The analysis is performed by searching for signatures of heavy neutral leptons that are directly produced via up-scattering of atmospheric $ν_τ$'s inside the IceCube detection volume. Three heavy neutral lepton mass values, $m_4$, of 0.3 GeV, 0.6 GeV, and 1.0 GeV are tested using ten years of data, collected between 2011 and 2021. No significant signal of heavy neutral leptons is observed for any of the tested masses. The resulting constraints for the mixing parameter are $|U_{\tau4}|^2 < 0.19$ ($m_4 = 0.3$ GeV), $|U_{\tau4}|^2 < 0.36$ ($m_4 = 0.6$ GeV), and $|U_{\tau4}|^2 < 0.40$ ($m_4 = 1.0$ GeV) at the 90% confidence level. This analysis serves as proof-of-concept for heavy neutral lepton searches in IceCube. The heavy neutral lepton event generator, developed in this work, and the analysis of the expected signatures lay the fundamental groundwork for future searches thereof.

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arXiv2025

Time-Integrated Southern-Sky Neutrino Source Searches with 10 Years of IceCube Starting-Track Events at Energies Down to 1 TeV

In the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a signal of astrophysical neutrinos is obscured by backgrounds from atmospheric neutrinos and muons produced in cosmic-ray interactions. IceCube event selections used to isolate the astrophysical neutrino signal often focus on t/he morphology of the light patterns recorded by the detector. The analyses presented here use the new IceCube Enhanced Starting Track Event Selection (ESTES), which identifies events likely generated by muon neutrino interactions within the detector geometry, focusing on neutrino energies of 1-500 TeV with a median angular resolution of 1.4°. Selecting for starting track events filters out not only the atmospheric-muon background, but also the atmospheric-neutrino background in the southern sky. This improves IceCube's muon neutrino sensitivity to southern-sky neutrino sources, especially for Galactic sources that are not expected to produce a substantial flux of neutrinos above 100 TeV. In this work, the ESTES sample was applied for the first time to searches for astrophysical sources of neutrinos, including a search for diffuse neutrino emission from the Galactic plane. No significant excesses were identified from any of the analyses; however, constraining limits are set on the hadronic emission from TeV gamma-ray Galactic plane objects and models of the diffuse Galactic plane neutrino flux.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2025

Search for neutrino doublets and triplets using 11.4 years of IceCube data

We report a search for high-energy astrophysical neutrino multiplets, detections of multiple neutrino clusters in the same direction within 30 days, based on an analysis of 11.4 years of IceCube data. A new search method optimized for transient neutrino emission with a monthly time scale is employed, providing a higher sensitivity to neutrino fluxes. This result is sensitive to neutrino transient emission, reaching per-flavor flux of approximately $10^{-10}\ {\rm erg}\ {\rm cm}^{-2}\ {\rm sec}^{-1}$ from the Northern sky in the energy range $E\gtrsim 50$~TeV. The number of doublets and triplets identified in this search is compatible with the atmospheric background hypothesis, which leads us to set limits on the nature of neutrino transient sources with emission timescales of one month.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2024

Methods and stability tests associated with the sterile neutrino search using improved high-energy $ν_μ$ event reconstruction in IceCube

We provide supporting details for the search for a 3+1 sterile neutrino using data collected over eleven years at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. The analysis uses atmospheric muon-flavored neutrinos from 0.5 to 100\, TeV that traverse the Earth to reach the IceCube detector, and finds a best-fit point at $\sin^2(2θ_{24}) = 0.16$ and $Δm^{2}_{41} = 3.5$ eV$^2$ with a goodness-of-fit p-value of 12\% and consistency with the null hypothesis of no oscillations to sterile neutrinos with a p-value of 3.1\%. Several improvements were made over past analyses, which are reviewed in this article, including upgrades to the reconstruction and the study of sources of systematic uncertainty. We provide details of the fit quality and discuss stability tests that split the data for separate samples, comparing results. We find that the fits are consistent between split data sets.

hep-ex↗