Dortmund 2021 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 42: Neutrino astronomy II

T 42.1: Talk

Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 16:00–16:15, Tq

Muon Deflection Angle Study with IceCube — •Pascal Gutjahr, Mirco Hünnefeld, and Wolfgang Rhode — TU Dortmund, Experimentelle Physik Vb

Neutrino detectors, such as IceCube, utilize muons resulting from charged current muon-neutrino interactions to infer the direction of the primary neutrino. These muons may travel several kilometers before entering the detector. Along this track, the muon may be deflected though interactions with the surrounding medium. Due to their high energies of hundreds of GeV to PeV, the muons are highly Lorentz boosted, resulting in small deflection angles. The deflection along the track is therefore assumed to be negligible for IceCube. However, these small deflection angles may accumulate over long distances.

A study is presented that investigates the impact of accumulated deflections along the muon track by introducing a scaling factor for bremsstrahlung interactions. This study focuses on the one hand on the possibility to measure this scaling factor with IceCube. On the other hand, the opening angle between the incoming and outgoing muon is studied as a function of scaling factor, energy and propagated distance via Monte Carlo simulation.