Bioluminescence modeling for deep sea experiments

Stephan Meighen-Berger; Li Ruohan; Golo Wimmer

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arXiv · 2103.03816

Bioluminescence modeling for deep sea experiments

Stephan Meighen-Berger·Li Ruohan·Golo Wimmer

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Abstract

We develop a modeling framework for bioluminescence light found in the deep sea near neutrino telescopes by combining a hydrodynamic model with a stochastic one. The bioluminescence is caused by organisms when exposed to a non-constant water flow, such as past the neutrino telescopes. We model the flow using the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for Reynolds numbers between 4000 and 23000. The discretization relies on a finite element method which includes upwind-stabilization for the velocity field. On top of the flow model, we simulate a population of random microscopic organisms. Their movement and emission are stochastic processes which we model using Monte Carlo methods. We observe unique time-series for the photon counts depending on the flow velocity and detector specifications. This opens up the possibility of categorizing organisms using neutrino detectors. We show that the average light-yield and pulse shapes require precise flow modeling, while the emission timing is chaotic. From this we construct a fast modeling scheme, requiring only a subset of computationally expensive flow and population modeling.

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Stephan Meighen-Berger, Li Ruohan, Golo Wimmer. 2021-02-09. Bioluminescence modeling for deep sea experiments. https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.03816

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