Abstract
Many neutrino interactions measured by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory produce only hadronic showers, which appear as almost point-like light emission due to the large detector spacing (125 m). At PeV energies these showers often saturate the PMTs closest to the interaction vertex - thus the reconstruction has to rely on more diffused photons which requires precise understanding of the optical properties of the Antarctic ice. Muons produced in the hadronic showers carry information about the neutrino direction, and their Cherenkov light arrives earlier than the photons emitted by the electromagnetic component. A new reconstruction method has been developed which explicitly takes into account the muonic component of hadronic showers and is shown to be robust against systematic ice uncertainties. By applying the new reconstruction, the angular resolution of multi-PeV cascade events can be significantly improved. This will potentially enable follow-up studies of the highest-energy cascade events measured by IceCube.
Highlights
High energy neutrino observatories in the TeV to PeV range detect neutrinos via Cherenkov light emitted by secondary particles created by the neutrino interactions
(b) Simulated PMT waveform where pi is the photon arrival time distribution for PMT i for a given track hypothesis H. pi can either be parametrized analytically [10] or obtained from splined lookup-tables. Due to their relatively low energies, the muons from hadronic showers will often create hits only on a single detector string, causing large degeneracies in the likelihood space of the track parameters. This can be mitigated by including the event vertex and its uncertainty obtained from a shower reconstruction as a prior into the track reconstruction
As a proof of concept, in fig. 3 we show the result of the reconstruction in terms of angular resolution for a simulated hadronic cascade resulting from a Glashow resonance (GR) neutrino interaction
Summary
High energy neutrino observatories in the TeV to PeV range detect neutrinos via Cherenkov light emitted by secondary particles created by the neutrino interactions For this purpose, large natural media such as the Antarctic ice (for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory [1]), the Mediterranean Sea (ANTARES [2], KM3NeT) [3], or Lake Baikal (Baikal GVD [4]) have been instrumented with photomultipliers (PMTs). Large natural media such as the Antarctic ice (for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory [1]), the Mediterranean Sea (ANTARES [2], KM3NeT) [3], or Lake Baikal (Baikal GVD [4]) have been instrumented with photomultipliers (PMTs) In these detectors, most neutrino interactions can be classified by their event signature as either track or shower. The average range of a 10 GeV muon is already larger than 40 m, a muon of such energy could outrange the shower, increasing the lever arm for the reconstruction
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