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vansanten_thesis_2014.pdf

Neutrino interactions in IceCube above 1 TeV : constraints on atmospheric charmed-meson production and investigation of the astrophysical neutrino flux with 2 years of IceCube data taken 2010--2012

High-energy neutrinos are ideal cosmic messengers, produced whenever cosmic rays interact with matter or photons near their as-yet unknown acceleration sites, and carrying information about the conditions there to Earth without being deflected by magnetic fields or absorbed by intervening matter. At the same time, neutrinos produced in cosmic-ray air showers provide information about hadronic physics in kinematic regions that are difficult to probe with terrestrial accelerators. This work presents an analysis of the energy spectrum and angular distribution of neutrinos that interacted inside the instrumented volume of the IceCube detector between May 2010 and May 2012. The analysis yielded new information about the energy spectrum of the recently discovered astrophysical neutrino flux as well as the maximum contribution to the neutrino flux from the prompt decays of charmed mesons produced in air showers. New reconstruction, event selection, and simulation techniques were developed in the course of this work. These are described in Sections 3.4.3, 4.2, 5.2.2--5.2.4, and 5.4.

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