Karlsruhe 2011 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 95: Neutrinoastronomie IV

T 95.1: Talk

Thursday, March 31, 2011, 16:45–17:00, 30.41: 105

Top-Down reconstruction of muon energies in IceCube — •Matthias Schunck and Christopher Wiebusch — II. Physikalisches Institut, RWTH Aachen, D-52056 Aachen

The IceCube neutrino observatory is designed for the detection of high-energy neutrinos from extra-terrestrial sources. A good energy resolution is important for the understanding of the underlying physical processes of a signal and to distinguish extra-terrestrial neutrinos from the dominating atmospheric background. In the common IceCube reconstruction, event observables are compared to the expectation for a given event hypothesis and the likelihood of the observation is maximized with respect to that hypothesis. The standard energy reconstruction method relies on approximations, such as the assumption that stochastic energy loss processes are averaged as continuous energy loss along the track. A complementary approach to reconstruction is a forward-folding algorithm based on the Top-Down principle. Here, an event is compared with a sample of simulated events and the most similar event determines the reconstructed energy. The comparison is based on a likelihood which quantifies the agreement of primary detector observables, such as the distribution of hits. This talk describes the implementation of the Top-Down algorithm and its application to the reconstruction of the neutrino energy in IceCube.