Search for Astronomical Neutrinos from Blazar TXS0506+056 in Super-Kamiokande

Hagiwara, Kaito

Search for Astronomical Neutrinos from Blazar TXS0506+056 in Super-Kamiokande

Kaito Hagiwara
(
- Okayama U.
)

Mar 25, 2020

176 pages

Supervisor:

Yusuke Koshio
(
- Okayama U.
)

Thesis: PhD

Okayama U.

(defense: Mar, 2020)

Published: Mar 25, 2020

Experiments:

SUPER-KAMIOKANDE

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Abstract: (submitter)

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory detected a high-energy neutrino event with an estimated energy 290 TeV on 22 September 2017 at 20:54:30:43 Coordinated Universal Time. The arrival direction of the neutrino coincides with the location of the blazar named TXS0506+056, which is located at right ascension = 77.3582◦ and declination = +5.6931◦ (redshift z = 0.3364±0.0010). Within a minute of detection, the information of this event shared via the Gamma-ray Coordinate Network and follow-up observations over a wide range of energies were carried out by several observatories. According to the Fermi All-sky Variability Analysis, TXS0506+056 brightened in the GeV band starting in April 2017. Subsequently, the IceCube collaboration additionally reported a possible neutrino event excess from this blazar in older data between September 2014 and March 2015. However, about the average from 2014 to 2015, neither excessive gamma-rays nor significant changes in the gamma ray spectrum are observed. The coincidence between the neutrino arrival direction and the blazar location as well as timing correlated with the associated gamma-ray flare suggest that the observed neutrinos originated from the blazar and strongly motivate searches for neutrinos in the other energy regions by Super-Kamiokande. Super-Kamiokande is a large water Cherenkov detector located 1,000 m underground in the Kamioka-mine, Gifu Prefecture, Japan. It is a cylindrical detector, 39.3 m in diameter and 41.4 m in height and contains 50 kilotons of ultra-pure water as neutrino target. The experiment has been operated since April 1996 and has made observations in four distinct phases known as SK-I, SK-II, SK-III, and SK-IV. In this study neutrino data from SK-I to SK-IV through February 2018 corresponding to 5,924.4 live days are used for analysis. To estimate the atmospheric neutrino background for this study, a 500-year-equivalent Monte Carlo simulation of each phase has been used. The present analysis utilizes the Super-Kamiokande neutrino data with more than 100 MeV of visible energy, divided into three classes depending upon the event topology. In the fully-contained and partially-contained event samples, the neutrino interaction is reconstructed within the inner-detector using Cherenkov rings produced by its daughter particles. An event where all daughter particles stop inside the detector is classified as fully-contained and those where at least one particle exits the detector is classified partially-contained. Upward-going muon events are observed when energetic muons produced by muon-neutrino interactions with the rock surrounding the detector penetrate the detector from below its horizon. To use events with sufficient angular resolution for association with the blazar direction, cut on the observed energy is applied. For these criteria, fully-contained and partially-contained samples are ensured that the angular deviation of the reconstructed direction from the truth is within 10 degrees for more than 68% of these events. Since upward-going muon events originate from neutrinos with higher energy than other categories, their arrival direction is estimated with higher accuracy. Therefore, no additional restriction on the upward-going muon energy is used as more than 77% of events are reconstructed within 5 degrees of the true arrival direction. By comparing to the expected backgrounds, no significance excess was observed at greater than the 1.2σ level in the blazar direction. The average and variance of the number of observed events in these off-source are compared with those in the on-source region around the blazar and showed consistency within 1.6σ. And the event rate in the on-source and the off-source are also consistent, indicating no excess of neutrino events in the direction of the blazar. No significant temporal increase of neutrino flux was found in the blazar direction by examining the change of the event rate using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov-test. Based on no signal assumption, upper limits of the neutrino fluence, the energy-dependent neutrino flux, and the neutrino luminosity are given for both electron-neutrinos and muon-neutrinos. We prepared four types of the neutrino energy spectrum for the calculation, which are three power-law types and one log-parabola type. The averaged fluence upper limits are placed on the electron-neutrino fluence of 1.9 × 10^4 cm^{−2} below 10 GeV and the muon-neutrino fluence of 8.0 × 10^4 to 3.1 × 10^{−1} cm^{−2} in the range 1 GeV to 10 TeV. The averaged upper limits of the energy-flux are 6.1 × 10−7 erg cm^{−2} sec^{−1} for electron-neutrinos and 4.8 × 10{−7} to 1.1 × 10^{−9} erg cm^{−2} sec^{−1} for muon-neutrinos. The luminosity is 1.9 × 10^{50} to 4.3 × 10^{47} erg sec^{−1} in the range 1 GeV to 10 TeV. The upper limit obtained in this study was compared with the numerical calculation by simulation. As a result, it was shown that neutrinos from the blazar is possible to be detected by SK. By using neutrinos in the GeV to TeV region that can be observed by SK, it is possible to limit the model parameters of blazar’s jet mechanism. From limiting the parameters, the origin of high-energy CRs and the mechanism of acceleration of CRs will be elucidated.

KAMIOKANDE
cosmic radiation
blazar
neutrino: background
neutrino: luminosity
neutrino: flux
neutrino: atmosphere
energy dependence
numerical calculations: Monte Carlo
Cherenkov counter: water

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