ABSTRACT

The observation of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has opened up a new window to the universe. These neutrinos traverse the longest distances from their sources and have the largest energy ever observed. These neutrinos open a new trail to search for new physics that covers parameter space not accessible to terrestrial neutrino experiments. In this colloquium, I will explain the inner workings of the IceCube neutrino observatory, discuss the latest measurements of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, and provide examples of new physics searches with these neutrinos.

About the Speaker:

Professor Arguelles has been an Assistant Professor at Harvard University since 2020. Their career began as an undergraduate and master in physics student at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru. Following that, they did their PhD at the University of Wisconsin Madison under the supervision of Prof. Francis Halzen, where they performed the first search for light sterile neutrinos with IceCube. Later, they were a postdoctoral researcher at MIT in Prof. Janet Conrad's group, where they continued to work on searches for new physics with high-energy energy atmospheric and astrophysical neutrinos. During this time, they were a lead author of the High-energy Starting Event 7.5 year analysis, where the first astrophysical tau neutrino was detected. Prof. Arguelles has earned several awards over the years. They were named the 2021 Sloan Research Fellow, the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Young Scientist in Astrophysics in 2021; they were listed as the Science News SN10: Scientist to Watch and were selected by Popular Science in their Brilliant 10 list. Finally, Prof. Arguelles earned the NSF CAREER Award in 2023, was named a Packard Fellow of Science and Engineering in 2023, and, more recently, they were named a 2024 Cottrell Scholar.