Abstract
IceCube is a cubic-kilometer Cherenkov telescope operating at the South Pole. Its goal is to detect astrophysical neutrinos and identify their sources. High-energy muon neutrinos are identified through the secondary muons produced via charge current interactions with the ice. The present bestperforming directional reconstruction of the muon track is a maximum likelihood method which uses the arrival time distribution of Cherenkov photons registered by the experiment’s photomultipliers. Known systematic shortcomings of this method are to assume continuous energy loss along the muon track, and to neglect photomultiplier-related effects such as prepulses and afterpulses. This work discusses an improvement of about 20% to the muon angular resolution of IceCube and its planned extension, IceCube-Gen2. In the reconstruction scheme presented here, the expected arrival time distribution is now parametrized by a predetermined stochastic muon energy loss pattern. The inclusion of pre- and afterpulses modelling in the PDF has also been studied, but no noticeable improvement was found, in particular in comparison to the modification of the energy loss profile.
Highlights
IceCube is a cubic-kilometer scale Cherenkov telescope operating at the South Pole [1], detecting neutrinos of all flavors with energies between tens of GeV and several PeV
IceCube consists of 5160 digital optical modules (DOMs), each containing a 10-inch photomultiplier tube (PMT)
The likelihood is maximized varying the track parameters. This is called Multi Photo Electron (MPE) likelihood, because it takes into account all light arriving at a DOM, but is adjusted to only use the timing information of the first photon. It is called “Spline” MPE, because the probability density function (PDF) are modeled by multidimensional splines which have been fitted to tabulated photon hits for a given Cherenkov emission hypothesis [7]
Summary
IceCube is a cubic-kilometer scale Cherenkov telescope operating at the South Pole [1], detecting neutrinos of all flavors with energies between tens of GeV and several PeV. IceCube-Gen is a planned generation neutrino observatory which will embed the current IceCube array, adding 120 new strings with a larger spacing [4]. It will increase the instrumented volume by a factor of 10 and will be able to detect sources ∼5 times fainter. Their exact resolution varies, depending on their energy. Improving the pointing accuracy for these tracks directly translates into a better discovery potential of the sources of astrophysical neutrinos. The resulting new reconstruction improves the old one by about 20%
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