Neutrino telescopes employ multi-level reconstruction chains, where computationally expensive high-quality reconstructions are applied only to events that survive initial quality cuts based on fast, coarse directional estimates. Currently, event selection between reconstruction levels is source-agnostic, giving no priority to events from directions of known neutrino source candidates. We propose a simple modification to inter-level event selection: preferentially retain events whose early-level reconstruction places them within an angular tolerance of pre-specified candidate source directions from established multi-messenger catalogs, while continuing to subsample remaining events at the baseline rate. Using a realistic two-level detector model with energy-dependent angular resolution, we show that this source-informed selection can improve median point source sensitivity by factors of ∼2--3 compared to uniform subsampling, with the improvement depending on the baseline selection efficiency, angular tolerance, and correlation between reconstruction qualities at different levels. For catalogs of O(100) sources, the additional computational overhead is modest (∼7--14%). This approach offers a path to substantially enhance the discovery potential of current and future neutrino telescopes without requiring new detector capabilities.
@article{arxiv.2604.06509,
title = {Improving Neutrino Point Source Sensitivity with Source-Informed Event Selection},
author = {Jeffrey Lazar and Carlos A. Argüelles and Pavel Zhelnin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.06509},
year = {2026}
}