Muon Track Reconstruction and Data Selection Techniques in AMANDA

• Main Authors: Collaboration, TAMANDA, Ahrens, J
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2004
• Subjects: astro-ph; astro-ph.IM; Antarctic; South Pole; The Antarctic; Antarc*; South pole
• Online Access: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1374988/

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.