| A century after their discovery, the origin of cosmic rays remains one of the most enduring mysteries in physics. They can have energies that exceed 1020 eV, a hundred million times as energetic as the most powerful Earth-bound particle accelerators and must therefore be produced in the universe's most violent environments. Direct observation of their origins, however, has proven difficult due to deflection of charged cosmic ray particles in galactic and intergalactic magnetic fields, obscuring their true origins. Astronomy using electrically neutral particles, such as photons and neutrinos, does not, however, share this difficulty.;This work presents a search for neutrino emission from one of the primary candidates for the sources of the highest-energy cosmic rays, Gamma-Ray Bursts, using the recently-completed IceCube neutrino telescope located at the South Pole. The null result obtained from this search contradicts well-established predictions for the neutrino flux from Gamma-Ray Bursts if they are the cosmic ray sources, forcing a reevaluation of these theoretical models. |
