The Search For High Energy Tau Neutrinos With The Icecube Neutrino Detector

Neutrinos are fundamental particles that have been studied by physicists extensively over many decades, yet much about them remains unknown. We do know that they come in three types or avors (electron, muon and tau), and we have observed that the tau avor is the most elusive, being harder to produce and detect due to the high mass of its associated tau lepton. The goal of this analysis is to collect the largest number of astrophysical tau neutrinos to date. The IceCube Collaboration has already made substantive progress with astrophysical tau neutrinos. We have discovered two astrophysical tau neutrino candidates and have excluded the possibility of there being no tau neutrinos at 2:8 . In this analysis of IceCube data we improve the tau neutrino event selection e ciency by roughly a factor of ve. This improvement is attained by lowering the energy threshold at which we can positively identify tau neutrino interactions through use of a new data representation coupled with modern machine learning algorithms.