Thesis defense of Leonora Kardum

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, situated at the South Pole within a cubic kilometer of underground ice, is a state-of-the-art experiment for detecting particles of high energies, with a special focus on investigating neutrino physics. The neutrino flux can be divided into three distinct components: astrophysical, originating from extraterrestrial sources; conventional, arising from the decay of pions and kaons in atmospheric cosmic ray cascades; and the prompt component, which has yet to be detected and stems from the decay of charmed hadrons. This study aims to reconstruct the total flux of neutrinos at Earth and places a particular emphasis on examining the predicted angular dependence. Unfolding encompasses a collection of techniques that aim to determine a quantity in a manner independent of specific assumptions, thereby removing the influence of various assumptions made during the process. In this analysis, the energy spectrum of muon neutrinos is unfolded with the employment of an innovative technique for reshaping the observable space to ensure an adequate number of events in the low statistic region at the highest energies. This work presents the unfolded energy and zenith angle spectrum reconstructed from eleven years of IceCube data in the range from 500 GeV to 4 PeV energies, and compares the findings with both model predictions and previous measurements.

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