Testing the Pointing of IceCube Using the Moon Shadow in Cosmic-Ray-Induced Muons

Saskia Philippen, Rasha Abbasi, M. Ackermann, Jenni Adams, Juanan Aguilar, M. Ahlers, Maryon Ahrens, Cyril Martin Alispach, A. A. Alves, Najia Moureen Binte Amin

Abstract

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic-kilometer-scaled detector located at the Geographic South Pole. The calibration of the directional reconstruction of neutrino-induced muons and the pointing accuracy of the detector have to be verified. For these purposes, the moon is used as a standard candle to not rely exclusively on simulated data: Cosmic rays get absorbed by the moon, which leads to a deficit of cosmic-ray-induced muons from the lunar direction that is measured with high statistics. The moon shadow analysis uses an unbinned maximum-likelihood method, which has been methodically improved, and uses a larger detector compared to previous analyses. This allows to observe the shadow with a large significance per month. In the first part, it is found that incorporating a moon disk model, a coordinate-dependent uncertainty scaling and an improved background estimation increase the significance compared to a previous more simplistic analysis. In the second part, the performance of two new directional muon reconstruction algorithms is verified.

Locations

• arXiv (Cornell University) - View - PDF
• Repository KITopen (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) - View - PDF
• Proceedings of 36th International Cosmic Ray Conference — PoS(ICRC2019) - View - PDF