| Abstract: | The understanding of novae, the thermonuclear eruptions on the surfaces of
white dwarf stars in binaries, has recently undergone a major paradigm shift.
Though the bolometric luminosity of novae was long thought to be solely
attributed to runaway nuclear burning, recent GeV gamma-ray observations have
supported the notion that a significant portion of the luminosity could come
from radiative shocks. More recently, observations of novae have lent evidence
that these shocks are acceleration sites for hadrons for at least some types of
novae. In this scenario, a flux of neutrinos may accompany the observed gamma
rays. As the gamma rays from most novae have only been observed up to a few
GeV, novae have previously not been considered as targets for neutrino
telescopes, which are most sensitive at and above TeV energies. Here, we
present the first search for neutrinos from novae with energies between a few
GeV and 10 TeV using IceCube-DeepCore, a densely instrumented region of the
IceCube Neutrino Observatory with a reduced energy threshold. We search both
for a correlation between gamma-ray and neutrino emission as well as between
optical and neutrino emission from novae. We find no evidence for neutrino
emission from the novae considered in this analysis and set upper limits for
all gamma-ray detected novae. |
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