Muon Track Reconstruction and Data Selection Techniques in AMANDA
Abstract
The Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) is a high-energy neutrino telescope operating at the geographic South Pole. It is a lattice of photo-multiplier tubes buried deep in the polar ice between 1500m and 2000m. The primary goal of this detector is to discover astrophysical sources of high energy neutrinos. A high-energy muon neutrino coming through the earth from the Northern Hemisphere can be identified by the secondary muon moving upward through the detector. The muon tracks are reconstructed with a maximum likelihood method. It models the arrival times and amplitudes of Cherenkov photons registered by the photo-multipliers. This paper describes the different methods of reconstruction, which have been successfully implemented within AMANDA. Strategies for optimizing the reconstruction performance and rejecting background are presented. For a typical analysis procedure the direction of tracks are reconstructed with about 2 degree accuracy.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0407044,
title = {Muon Track Reconstruction and Data Selection Techniques in AMANDA},
author = {The AMANDA Collaboration and J. Ahrens},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0407044},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
40 pages, 16 Postscript figures, uses elsart.sty