A muon-track reconstruction exploiting stochastic losses for large-scale Cherenkov detectors

Journal article

IceCube is a cubic-kilometer Cherenkov telescope operating at the South Pole. The main goal of IceCube is the detection of astrophysical neutrinos and the identification of their sources. High-energy muon neutrinos are observed via the secondary muons produced in charge current interactions with nuclei in the ice. Currently, the best performing muon track directional reconstruction is based on a maximum likelihood method using the arrival time distribution of Cherenkov photons registered by the experiment's photomultipliers. A known systematic shortcoming of the prevailing method is to assume a continuous energy loss along the muon track. However at energies >1 TeV the light yield from muons is dominated by stochastic showers. This paper discusses a generalized ansatz where the expected arrival time distribution is parametrized by a stochastic muon energy loss pattern. This more realistic parametrization of the loss profile leads to an improvement of the muon angular resolution of up to 20% for through-going tracks and up to a factor 2 for starting tracks over existing algorithms. Additionally, the procedure to estimate the directional reconstruction uncertainty has been improved to be more robust against numerical errors.

Authors: Abbasi, R; Ackermann, M; Adams, J; Aguilar, JA; Ahlers, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: IOP Science
• Journal: Journal of Instrumentation
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 8
• Article number: P08034
• Publication date: 2021-08-12
• Acceptance date: 2021-06-27
• DOI: 10.1088/1748-0221/16/08/P08034
• EISSN: 1748-0221
• Language: English
• Keywords: hep-ex; FFR; astro-ph.IM