Abstract
The Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (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.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 169-194 |
Number of pages | 26 |
Journal | Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research, Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment |
Volume | 524 |
Issue number | 1-3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 21 May 2004 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- AMANDA
- Neutrino astrophysics
- Neutrino telescope
- Track reconstruction