Monte Carlo simulations for the ANTARES underwater neutrino telescope

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of Monte Carlo simulation tools for the ANTARES underwater neutrino telescope, accounting for environmental variability and detector response to produce realistic event data.

Contribution

It introduces new software tools and strategies to simulate neutrino and cosmic ray signatures while modeling environmental changes and detector efficiency over time.

Findings

Effective simulation of neutrino and cosmic ray events

Realistic modeling of environmental variability

Enhanced detector performance monitoring

Abstract

Monte Carlo simulations are a unique tool to check the response of a detector and to monitor its performance. For a deep-sea neutrino telescope, the variability of the environmental conditions that can affect the behaviour of the data acquisition system must be considered, in addition to a reliable description of the active parts of the detector and of the features of physics events, in order to produce a realistic set of simulated events. In this paper, the software tools used to produce neutrino and cosmic ray signatures in the telescope and the strategy developed to represent the time evolution of the natural environment and of the detector efficiency are described.