Testing the Pointing of IceCube using the Moon Shadow in Cosmic-Ray Induced Muons

• Main Authors: Philippen, Saskia, Glüsenkamp, Thorsten, Schindler, Sebastian
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: arXiv 2021
• Subjects: High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena astro-ph.HE; Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics astro-ph.IM; FOS Physical sciences; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2108.04093; https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.04093

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