Speaker
Description
With the first high-energy neutrino sources identified, the bulk of IceCube's diffuse flux remains unresolved, which points to a population of numerous faint emitters. Stacking searches that correlate neutrino events with source catalogs have been carried out before, but inappropriate source weighting may have left them insensitive to such populations. We show how to avoid this loss of sensitivity and how to gain sensitivity at the faint, distant end of the population, where the discreteness of high-energy neutrinos means even very faint sources can contribute individual events. Using a semi-analytic framework, we project the sensitivity as a function of background level and source redshift evolution. We further show that a Bayesian framework enables reconstruction of population properties and gives higher sensitivity than a maximum-likelihood approach. This opens the possibility of constraining the redshift evolution of neutrino sources in the near future, a step toward identifying the sites of cosmic-ray acceleration.