Search strategies for discovering extraterrestrial neutrinos with IceCube

With completion expected in 2011, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory is approaching the 1km3 scale required for high energy neutrino astronomy. Before completion, the data taken with the deployed strings of the IceCube detector allows the testing of different procedures of searching for high energy neutrinos of extraterrestrial origin. This work describes some of the approaches used by the IceCube collaboration to search for point-like and extended sources. Emphasis will be placed on the results obtained from the analysis of the Cygnus region using data from the combined detector configuration IceCube-22-strings and AMANDA. The method presented here uses a two-point analysis to detect, within an extended region, event patterns which might go undetected in conventional point-source analysis.