Preliminary Design Document

By Section | Whole Paper | PDF (233 pages, ~6.62mb)

• 5.1 Introduction
• 5.2 Atmospheric Neutrinos
• 5.3 Muon-Neutrino-Induced Muons
  • 5.3.1 Simulation
  • 5.3.2 Reconstruction and Background Rejection
  • 5.3.3 Sensitivity to Diffuse Sources of Muon Neutrinos
  • 5.3.4 Sensitivity to Muon Neutrino Point Sources
  • 5.3.5 Sensitivity to Muon Neutrinos from Gamma-Ray Bursts
  • 5.3.6 Possible Improvements
• 5.4 Electromagnetic and Hadronic Cascades
  • 5.4.1 Simulation
  • 5.4.2 Reconstruction
  • 5.4.3 Effective Volume
  • 5.4.4 Sensitivity to Atmospheric ν
  • 5.4.5 Sensitivity to Point Sources
  • 5.4.6 Sensitivity to Diffuse ν_e Sources
  • 5.4.7 Sensitivity to GRBs
  • 5.4.8 Possible Improvements
• 5.5 Tau Neutrinos
  • 5.5.1 Tau Neutrino Event Rates
  • 5.5.2 Tau Neutrino Simulations
• 5.6 Neutrino Flavor Differentiation with Waveform Digitization
  • 5.6.1 Photon Flux Distribution Generated by High Energy Cascades
  • 5.6.2 ν_τ Event Signatures
  • 5.6.3 Summary
• 5.7 Lower Energy Phenomena and Exotica
  • 5.7.1 Muon Neutrinos from WIMP annihilation
  • 5.7.2 Neutrino oscillations
  • 5.7.3 MeV Neutrinos from Supernovae
  • 5.7.4 Relativistic magnetic monopoles
  • 5.7.5 Slowly moving, bright particles
• 5.8 IceCube Configuration Flexibility
• 5.9 Calibration of High-Level Detector Response Variables
  • 5.9.1 Geometry Calibration
  • 5.9.2 Calibration of Angular Response
  • 5.9.3 Calibration of Vertex Resolution
  • 5.9.4 Energy Calibration
• 5.10 IceTop
  • 5.10.1 Tagged Muon Bundles
  • 5.10.2 IceTop as a Veto
  • 5.10.3 Cosmic-ray Physics

5.2 Atmospheric Neutrinos

The largest contribution to the ν flux from non-transient sources in the energy range of several hundreds of MeV to at least several hundreds of TeV is atmospheric neutrinos. The atmospheric ν flux is dominated by the muon component, increasing from a 2:1 ν_μ : ν_e ratio at low energies E_ν ∼ 1 GeV to 30:1 at E_ν ∼ 100 TeV so that the atmospheric ν "background" to UHE cascades is somewhat smaller than for UHE muons. The following sections will address the use of atmospheric neutrinos as a calibration source at lower energies, and their rejection as a background source at higher energies.

Table of Contents

Last modified: July 17, 2007

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