Testing the Pointing of IceCube using the Moon Shadow in Cosmic-Ray Induced Muons
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic-kilometer-scaled detector located at the Geographic South Pole. The calibration of the directional reconstruction of neutrino-induced muons and the pointing accuracy of the detector have to be verified. For these purposes, the moon is used as a standard ca...
Main Authors: | , , |
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Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
Language: | unknown |
Published: |
arXiv
2021
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Subjects: | |
Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2108.04093 https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.04093 |
Summary: | The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic-kilometer-scaled detector located at the Geographic South Pole. The calibration of the directional reconstruction of neutrino-induced muons and the pointing accuracy of the detector have to be verified. For these purposes, the moon is used as a standard candle to not rely exclusively on simulated data: Cosmic rays get absorbed by the moon, which leads to a deficit of cosmic-ray-induced muons from the lunar direction that is measured with high statistics. The moon shadow analysis uses an unbinned maximum-likelihood method, which has been methodically improved, and uses a larger detector compared to previous analyses. This allows to observe the shadow with a large significance per month. In the first part, it is found that incorporating a moon disk model, a coordinate-dependent uncertainty scaling and an improved background estimation increase the significance compared to a previous more simplistic analysis. In the second part, the performance of two new directional muon reconstruction algorithms is verified. : Presented at the 37th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2021). See arXiv:2107.06966 for all IceCube contributions. 8 pages, 2 figures |
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