Muon track reconstruction and data selection techniques in AMANDA

The Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector A rray (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 1500 and 2000 m . 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° accuracy.

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40 pages, 16 Postscript figures, uses elsart.sty

neutrino: cosmic radiation
muon: showers
Cherenkov counter: water
solids: water
photomultiplier
muon: track data analysis
statistical analysis
muon: background
AMANDA
bibliography

References(17)

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