Time calibration with atmospheric muon tracks in the ANTARES neutrino telescope

Abstract

The ANTARES experiment consists of an array of photomultipliers distributed along 12 lines and located deep underwater in the Mediterranean Sea. It searches for astrophysical neutrinos collecting the Cherenkov light induced by the charged particles, mainly muons, produced in neutrino interactions around the detector. Since at energies of $\sim$10 TeV the muon and the incident neutrino are almost collinear, it is possible to use the ANTARES detector as a neutrino telescope and identify a source of neutrinos in the sky starting from a precise reconstruction of the muon trajectory. To get this result, the arrival times of the Cherenkov photons must be accurately measured. A to perform time calibrations with the precision required to have optimal performances of the instrument is described. The reconstructed tracks of the atmospheric muons in the ANTARES detector are used to determine the relative time offsets between photomultipliers. Currently, this method is used to obtain the time calibration constants for photomultipliers on different lines at a precision level of 0.5 ns. It has also been validated for calibrating photomultipliers on the same line, using a system of LEDs and laser light devices.

arXiv commentSubmitted to Astroparticle Physics (17 pages, 11 figures)

References in corpus (12)

• ANTARES: the first undersea neutrino telescope
• Atmospheric neutrino flux above 1 GeV
• The ANTARES Optical Module
• The data acquisition system for the ANTARES neutrino telescope
• Atmospheric MUons from PArametric formulas: a fast GEnerator for neutrino telescopes (MUPAGE)
• Search for Cosmic Neutrino Point Sources with Four Years of Data from the ANTARES Telescope
• Searches for Point-like and extended neutrino sources close to the Galactic Centre using the ANTARES neutrino Telescope
• Time Calibration of the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope
• Study of Large Hemispherical Photomultiplier Tubes for the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope
• The ANTARES Optical Beacon System
• First Search for Point Sources of High Energy Cosmic Neutrinos with the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope
• Performance of the front-end electronics of the ANTARES neutrino telescope

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Neutrino telescopes and high-energy cosmic neutrinos
• Long-term monitoring of the ANTARES optical module efficiencies using ${}^{40}\mathrm{K}$ decays in sea water
• Introducing a Markov Chain-Based Time Calibration Procedure for Multi-Channel Particle Detectors: Application to the SuperFGD and ToF Detectors of the T2K Experiment