Astronomy potential of ARCA
22 November 2024 – In a paper with the title ‘Astronomy potential of KM3NeT/ARCA’ we present improvements that indeed enhance the astronomy potential of the ARCA detector.
An important scientific objective for constructing the ARCA detector is the detection of high-energy cosmic neutrinos from point-like sources. Scattering off the quarks inside a nucleon, neutrinos induce hadrons that generate a shower of particles. In so-called charge current interactions also a charged lepton is produced: a muon, electron or tau. These leptons have different signatures in the detector. Muons traverse the detector with a straight track of light, while electrons and taus generate outburst of light in the detector. This results in two main event detection signatures: track-like or shower-like events.
With the ARCA detector, we can use both detection signatures for investigating the Southern Sky, where many neutrino sources are expected along the Galactic Plane. For this we further improved the neutrino event selection method and the event reconstruction software of both track-like and shower-like events.
Simulations show that the improvements enhanced the sensitivity and discovery potential of ARCA for neutrino sources by 5-15%.
The paper is published in EPJ-C:
Eur. Phys. J. C 84, 885 (2024)
DOI: 10.1140/epjc/s10052-024-13137-2)
In the image (click on the image for a better resolution):
The ARCA point-like source sensitivity (black curves) as a function of sin(δ) (δ is the declination angle) with γ = 2.0 (γ is spectral index, which matches the energy spectrum of cosmic rays undergoing Fermi acceleration) . For comparison, the results of 15 years of observation with the ANTARES telescope (green curve) and 7 and 10 years of of observation with the IceCube telescope (red curves) are also shown.
