Observation of the cosmic ray shadow of the Sun with the ANTARES neutrino telescope

Abstract

The ANTARES detector is an undersea neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean Sea. The search for point-like neutrino sources is one of the main goals of the ANTARES telescope, requiring a reliable method to evaluate the detector angular resolution and pointing accuracy. This work describes the study of the Sun "shadow" effect with the ANTARES detector. The shadow is the deficit in the atmospheric muon flux in the direction of the Sun caused by the absorption of the primary cosmic rays. This analysis is based on the data collected between 2008 and 2017 by the ANTARES telescope. The observed statistical significance of the Sun shadow detection is $3.7\sigma$, with an estimated angular resolution of $0.59^{\circ }\pm 0.10^{\circ }$ for downward-going muons. The pointing accuracy is found to be consistent with the expectations and no evidence of systematic pointing shifts is observed.

7 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Atmospheric MUons from PArametric formulas: a fast GEnerator for neutrino telescopes (MUPAGE)
• ANTARES and IceCube Combined Search for Neutrino Point-like and Extended Sources in the Southern Sky
• Moon Shadow by Cosmic Rays under the Influence of Geomagnetic Field and Search for Antiprotons at Multi-TeV Energies

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Constraining the contribution of Gamma-Ray Bursts to the high-energy diffuse neutrino flux with 10 years of ANTARES data
• Gravitational lensing of massive particles by a black-bounce-Schwarzschild black hole
• First observation of the cosmic ray shadow of the Moon and the Sun with KM3NeT/ORCA
• Leading-order deflection of particles by a moving Schwarzschild lens with a two-dimensional velocity
• Observation of the cosmic ray shadow of the Sun with the ANTARES neutrino telescope
• Strong field gravitational lensing of particles by a black-bounce-Schwarzschild black hole
• Search for solar atmospheric neutrinos with the ANTARES neutrino telescope