12–23 Jul 2021
Online
Europe/Berlin timezone

Methods for the suppression of background cascades produced along atmospheric muon tracks

16 Jul 2021, 12:00
1h 30m
05

05

Poster NU | Neutrinos & Muons Discussion

Speaker

Zuzana Bardačová (Comenius University in Bratislava)

Description

The Baikal-GVD detector (Gigaton Volume Detector) is a large-scale neutrino telescope located at a depth of 1366 metres in Lake Baikal. One of its main purposes is to identify high-energy extraterrestrial neutrinos and to locate their sources on the sky. In recent (year 2020), it is a three dimensional array of 2016 optical modules (OMs), sub-arranged into 7 functionally independent units called clusters.

Charged-current interactions of electron neutrino and neutral-current interactions of all three neutrino flavours create a unique light signature of a single “cascade” in the detector. However, cascade pattern can also be produced by discrete stochastic energy losses along the atmospheric muon tracks. These constitute an avoidable background in the search of astrophysical neutrinos. Therefore, different kinds of data analysis methods for the suppression of background events have been developed.

The suppression is achieved by means of the time and charge information of signals detected at the OMs. One of the method tries to find the maximum number of track hits amongst cascade hits, which are present in the muon bundle event. Other techniques rely on the distributions of hits charges and positions of hit OMs associated with cascade events. All suppression tools were developed and optimized on the Monte Carlo simulation datasets.

Keywords

neutrinos; cascades; atmospheric muons; background cascades;

Subcategory Experimental Results
Collaboration other (fill field below)
other Collaboration Baikal Collaboration

Primary authors

Zuzana Bardačová (Comenius University in Bratislava) For the Baikal Collaboration

Presentation materials