Down going muon rate monitoring in the ANTARES detector

TL;DR

This paper discusses monitoring the rate of downward muons in the ANTARES underwater neutrino detector to ensure data quality across different environmental conditions and detector configurations.

Contribution

It introduces criteria for grouping detector runs based on the effective number of active PMTs to maintain consistent muon rate measurements.

Findings

Effective criteria for grouping detector runs established.

Muon rate monitoring helps account for environmental and configuration variations.

Supports reliable high-energy neutrino detection analysis.

Abstract

Large underwater telescopes have been proposed as a challenging method to measure high energy neutrinos from astrophysical objects. In recent years, The Antares collaboration has designed and realized the first detector of this type in the Mediterranean Sea. Muon tracks produced by the neutrino interaction in the surrounding medium are reconstructed from the arrival time and the number of photo-electrons of the Cherenkov light measured by the Photomultiplier tubes (PMT) array of the detector. In order to provide sufficient statistics, the events from various periods in the year must be summed together taking care of the various environmental conditions and detector configurations. In this note we describe effective criteria to group compatible runs based on the effective number of active PMTs in each run.