Design, performance, and analysis of a measurement of optical properties of antarctic ice below 400 nm

• Main Authors: Brostean-Kaiser, Jannes, Aguilar Sanchez, Juan Antonio, Baur, Sebastian, Iovine, Nadège, Maris, Ioana Codrina, Mockler, Daniela, Raab, Christoph, Renzi, Giovanni, Toscano, Simona
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Généralités; Antarc*; Antarctic; South pole
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/363099; https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/363099/3/ICRC2021_1057.pdf

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, located at the geographic South Pole, is the world’s largest neutrino telescope, instrumenting 1 km3 of Antarctic ice with 5160 photosensors to detect Cherenkov light. For the IceCube Upgrade, to be deployed during the 2022-23 polar field season, and the enlarged detector IceCube-Gen2 several new optical sensor designs are under development. One of these optical sensors, the Wavelength-shifting Optical Module (WOM), uses wavelength-shifting and light-guiding techniques to measure Cherenkov photons in the UV range from 250 nm to 380 nm. In order to understand the potential gains from this new technology, a measurement of the scattering and absorption lengths of UV light was performed in the SPICEcore borehole at the South Pole during the winter seasons of 2018/2019 and 2019/2020. For this purpose, a calibration device with a UV light source and a detector using the wavelength shifting technology was developed. We present the design of the developed calibration device, its performance during the measurement campaigns, and the comparison of data to a Monte Carlo simulation. 0 SCOPUS: cp.p info:eu-repo/semantics/published