Probing the PeV region in the astrophysical neutrino spectrum using <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mml:msub><mml:mi>ν</mml:mi><mml:mi>μ</mml:mi></mml:msub></mml:math> from the Southern sky

IceCube has observed a diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux over the energy region from a few TeV to a few PeV. At PeVenergies, the spectral shape is not yet well measured due to the low statistics of the data. This analysis probes the gap between 1 and 10 PeV by using high-energy downgoing muon neutrinos. To reject the large atmospheric muon background, two complementary techniques are combined. The first technique selects events with high stochasticity to reject atmospheric muon bundles whose stochastic energy losses are smoothed due to high muon multiplicity. The second technique vetoes atmospheric muons with the IceTop surface array. Using 9 yrs of data, we found two neutrino candidate events in the signal region, consistent with expectation from…