Mainz 2014 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 34: Neutrinoastronomie 1

T 34.7: Vortrag

Montag, 24. März 2014, 18:20–18:35, P13

Study on tau reconstructions in IceCube — •Yunlin Liu, Marek Kowalski, and Marcel Usner for the IceCube collaboration — Physikalisches Institut, Universität Bonn

With the IceCube detector - a cubic-kilometer sized array of optical sensors embedded in the Antarctic ice - it has recently been possible for the first time to establish a flux of extra-terrestrial neutrinos. Since the atmospheric tau neutrinos are only produced by prompt decays of rare charm hadrons, the atmospheric tau neutrinos component is small compared to the atmospheric muon or electron neutrinos as the main background. At low energies, tau leptons from the charged current interaction of a tau neutrino with an ice nucleus can barely be distinguished from an electromagnetic cascade caused by the charged current interaction of an electron neutrino since the decay length of the tau is too short. For a PeV tau the propagation length before decay will be in the order of 50 m. In this energy regime one may resolve the Double Bang signature of a high energy tau neutrino event as two separate cascades in the detector. In this talk I will discuss the potential to identify tau neutrino events in IceCube and to distinguish them from electron neutrino events using existing IceCube reconstruction methods.