Gamma Ray Astronomy With IceCube

Abstract

We demonstrate that the South Pole kilometer-scale neutrino observatory IceCube can detect multi-TeV gamma rays continuously over a large fraction of the southern sky. While not as sensitive as pointing atmospheric Cerenkov telescopes, IceCube can roughly match the sensitivity of Milagro. Also, IceCube is complementary to Milagro because it will observe, without interruption, a relatively poorly studied fraction of the southern sky. The information which IceCube must record to function as a gamma ray observatory is only the directions and possibly energies of down-going muons.