Research project IM/RT/23/LEANI (Research action IM)
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, buried in the ice of the South Pole, has opened a new window on the Universe. In addition to study the most energetic astrophysical phenomena with light, IceCube has demonstrated blazars, Seyfert galaxies and even our own galaxy may be observed using neutrinos, the most elusive particles discovered up to date.
Despite more than a decade of operation, IceCube has not yet elucidated the origin of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos to its full extent. While new instruments are planned to increase the size of IceCube or search for neutrinos at even higher energies to solve the question, LEANI will look at the 15 years of data from a different angle.
LEANI will work on three different axes towards the understanding of the origin of astrophysical neutrinos:
- Development of a new analysis of IceCube data using an acquisition system, HitSpooling, which allows us to save every single neutrino interaction happening in the ice surrounding the observatory, lowering the current energy threshold for individual neutrino detection at the South Pole by an order of magnitude. This ambitious task will extract neutrinos from the large background coming from the ice and the detector itself using advanced unsupervised machine learning techniques. In parallel, we will seek for the help of Citizen Scientists as the human eyes can identify features in data a machine would not see. The results of the two different approaches will be gathered to create the new way of analysis IceCube data.
- This new approach will allow IceCube to be sensitive from the MeV to the PeV range, covering more than 10 orders of magnitude in energy. However, the current analyses are targeting each energy band independently. The second goal of LEANI is to combine the observations from each energy band in a cohesive manner, providing unprecedented sensitivity. As illustration of the method, LEANI will create the first catalog of neutrino energy distributions from compact binary mergers.
- LEANI will finally prepare the observation with the next generation of neutrino telescope at the South Pole by capitalizing on the knowledge acquired on background coming from the ice and the detector itself isolated during the new analysis developed in the first axis.
LEANI is expected to make a leap forward in the way astrophysical neutrino data are processed and combined.
