ANTARES alternative event reconstruction strategies

TL;DR

This paper discusses various strategies for reconstructing high-energy neutrino events in the ANTARES telescope, aiming to improve angular resolution and analyze real data from the detector.

Contribution

It introduces and reviews multiple event reconstruction strategies specifically designed for the ANTARES neutrino telescope.

Findings

Reconstruction strategies achieve angular resolution better than 0.3 degrees above 10 TeV.

Application of strategies to real data demonstrates their effectiveness.

Different algorithms improve initial estimations and final fitting of muon tracks.

Abstract

The ANTARES Collaboration is building a high-energy neutrino telescope at 2500 m depth in the Mediterranean Sea. The experiment aims to search for high-energy cosmic neutrinos through the detection of Cerenkov light induced by muons and showers resulting from neutrino interactions with the surrounding medium. The detector will consist of a three-dimensional array of 900 optical modules housing photomultipliers. It will be composed of 12 strings, 5 of them being already in operation since January 2007. The muon track is reconstructed from the arrival time and the charge of the signals obtained from the photomultipliers, whose positions are known by means of an acoustic positioning system. The reconstruction strategies include several steps among which there are: optical background filtering, algorithms for first estimations of the track parameters, and a final fit aiming to reach an angular resolution better than 0.3 degree above 10 TeV in the full detector. Different reconstruction strategies will be presented and their application to the present real data analysis will be reviewed.