Search for steady point-like sources in the astrophysical muon neutrino flux with 8 years of IceCube data

Abstract The IceCube Collaboration has observed a high-energy astrophysical neutrino flux and recently found evidence for neutrino emission from the blazar TXS 0506 $$+$$ + 056. These results open a new window into the high-energy universe. However, the source or sources of most of the observed flux of astrophysical neutrinos remains uncertain. Here, a search for steady point-like neutrino sources is performed using an unbinned likelihood analysis. The method searches for a spatial accumulation of muon-neutrino events using the very high-statistics sample of about 497,000 neutrinos recorded by IceCube between 2009 and 2017. The median angular resolution is $$\sim 1^\circ $$ ∼ 1 ∘ at 1 TeV and improves to $$\sim 0.3^\circ $$ ∼ 0 . 3 ∘ for neutrinos with an energy of 1 PeV. Compared to previous analyses, this search is optimized for point-like neutrino emission with the same flux-characteristics as the observed astrophysical muon-neutrino flux and introduces an improved event-reconstruction and parametrization of the background. The result is an improvement in sensitivity to the muon-neutrino flux compared to the previous analysis of $$\sim 35\%$$ ∼ 35 % assuming an $$E^{-2}$$ E - 2 spectrum. The sensitivity on the muon-neutrino flux is at a level of $$E^2 \mathrm {d} N /\mathrm {d} E = 3\cdot 10^{-13}\,\mathrm {TeV}\,\mathrm {cm}^{-2}\,\mathrm {s}^{-1}$$ E 2 d N / d E = 3 · 10 - 13 TeV cm - 2 s - 1 . No new evidence for neutrino sources is found in a full sky scan and in an a priori candidate source list that is motivated by gamma-ray observations. Furthermore, no significant excesses above background are found from populations of sub-threshold sources. The implications of the non-observation for potential source classes are discussed