Studies of Track-like Neutrino Event Identification in the PINGU Detector
Open Access
- Author:
- Groh, John Collin
- Area of Honors:
- Physics
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Tyce De Young, Thesis Supervisor
Prof. Richard Wallace Robinett, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- PINGU
IceCube
DeepCore
neutrino
Cherenkov radiation
neutrino mass hierarchy
neutrino oscillations - Abstract:
- The Precision IceCube Next Generation Upgrade (PINGU) is a proposed upgrade to the existing IceCube and DeepCore Antractic neutrino detectors, which use the ice as a Cherenkov medium to detect charged secondary particles from neutrino interactions. PINGU would consist of a denser infill array of optical detectors inside the DeepCore array and would lower the neutrino energy detection threshold to a few GeV. While the physics goals of PINGU are numerous, most center around neutrino oscillation measurements and a determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy. If funded, PINGU could begin taking data as early as 2017. Of particular interest to PINGU are oscillations of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos. As such, an important class of events for PINGU is the set of muon neutrino charged current interactions. By selecting track-like events in PINGU (i.e., those which involve the production of a muon), a relatively clean sample of muon neutrino charged current events with good directional information can be obtained. The ability to directly identify these track-like events would benefit many PINGU analyses. This thesis is a contribution to the development of an identification method for track-like neutrino events in PINGU. To search for identifiable differences between track-like and other neutrino events, two identification variables were constructed and studied with simulations of muon neutrino events in PINGU. The former, which was based on a comparison of likelihood values from similar reconstructions, was determined to produce insufficient separation between signal and background events. The latter variable is instead based on differences in the timing distribution of Cherenkov photons between track-like and other neutrino events, and it shows much better separation at energies greater than about 5 GeV. This variable will continue to be used for PINGU as part of a more comprehensive identification scheme.