A Search for High-Energy Neutrinos from Core-Collapse Supernovae

Since the discovery of high energetic cosmic rays their origin poses an open question. High- energy neutrino emission is considered a smoking-gun signature of cosmic ray production. Ice- Cube discovered a diuse flux of astrophysical neutrinos but despite extensive search no neu- trino sources have been identified yet. In this work we prepare the investigation of high-energy neutrino production in core-collapse supernovae. It uses seven years of IceCube muon track data and a previously assembled catalogue of optically detected core-collapse supernovae. The search is based on the combination of supernovae in a stacking analysis where the weights of individual events are treated as free parameters. We validate the implementation against a well tested code. The building of the energy PDF that is presented as the biggest potential for dierences between the codes does not show significant impact. However deviations in sensitivity calculations up to 30% can not be explained and remain subject to ongoing investi- gation. We still use the method to calculate IceCube’s sensitivity to this search which can be used to set upper limits if no correlation is found in the future. The most sensitive case are stripped envelope supernovae that could harbour a choked jet and the neutrino signal would be very short and around the explosion time. We investigate how well a semi-analytical model fit with MOSFiT can predict the explosion time of these supernovae based on lightcurves ob- served by the Zwicky Transient facility. Using simulations that do not include early phases we get a good agreement to within a six day time window. We find that in order to get good predictions for realistic observations we have to expand the existing model by a description of the shock-breakout phase. We show for one example that this can predict the explosion time to sub-day scale and encourage systematic studies with simulations that do include early phases