Search

Cosmic-ray interactions with the solar atmosphere are expected to produce particle showers which in turn produce neutrinos from weak decays of mesons. These solar atmospheric neutrinos (SAνs) have never been observed experimentally. A detection would be an important step in understanding cosmic-ray propagation in the inner solar system and the dynamics of solar magnetic fields. SAνs also represent an irreducible background to solar dark matter searches and a detection would allow precise characterization of this background. Here, we present the first experimental search based on seven years of data collected from May 2010 to May 2017 in the austral winter with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. An unbinned likelihood analysis is performed for events reconstructed within 5 degrees of the center of the Sun. No evidence for a SAν flux is observed. After inclusion of systematic uncertainties, we set a 90% upper limit of 1.02+0.20-0.18·10-13 GeV-1cm-2s-1 at 1 TeV.

We develop a formalism for constructing the Pontecorvo-Maki-Nakagawa-Sakata (PMNS) matrix and neutrino masses using an expansion that originates when a sequence of heavy right handed neutrinos are integrated out, assuming a seesaw mechanism for the origin of neutrino masses. The expansion establishes relationships between the structure of the PMNS matrix and the mass differences of neutrinos, and allows symmetry implications for measured deviations from tri-bimaximal form to be studied systematically. Our approach does not depend on choosing the rotation between the weak and mass eigenstates of the charged lepton fields to be diagonal. We comment on using this expansion to examine the symmetry implications of the recent results from the Daya-Bay collaboration reporting the discovery of a non zero value for θ13, indicating a deviation from tri-bimaximal form, with a significance of 5.2σ.