Muon Track Reconstruction and Data Selection Techniques in AMANDA

The AMANDA Collaboration; J. Ahrens

doi:10.1016/j.nima.2004.01.065

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arXiv · astro-ph/0407044

Muon Track Reconstruction and Data Selection Techniques in AMANDA

The AMANDA Collaboration·J. Ahrens

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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.

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The AMANDA Collaboration, J. Ahrens. 2004-07-02. Muon Track Reconstruction and Data Selection Techniques in AMANDA. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nima.2004.01.065

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