Muon energy reconstruction and atmospheric neutrino spectrum unfolding with the ANTARES detector

Abstract

Measurement of the atmospheric muon neutrino spectrum is important since it is a test on the expected con- ventional atmospheric neutrino fluxes as well as on the prompt contribution from charm decay. In addition to that, it forms the irreducible background for high energy cosmic neutrinos searches. A number of methods have been developed within the ANTARES collaboration for the estimation of the energy of muon tracks traversing the detector. These include a maximum likelihood method, an approach based on neural networks as well as an estimator based on the energy loss of the muon along its track. The reconstructed muon energy can be used to calculate the energy spectrum of the atmospheric neutrinos by using a singular value decomposition approach on regularized unfolding. The most recent results on the energy reconstruction and spectrum deconvolution will be presented.