Speaker
Description
The IceCube neutrino observatory instruments 1 $km^{3}$ of Antartic ice that represents the detection target and the light propagation medium. The IceCube detector instruments several thousands optical sensors, that detect Cherenkov light emitted from secondary particles (muons) created in neutrino interactions. From these photons, it is possible to reconstruct the muon (and therefore the parent neutrino) incoming direction and energy. To estimate the accuracy of these reconstructed quantities, the properties of light propagation in the ice must be well understood. As the photons propagate from the point of emission, they are affected by absorption and scattering, which must be considered for both simulation and reconstruction of IceCube data. Below about 1300 m, the ice is considered pure and clear. However, after 1300 m dust is found trapped in the ice, which represents the dominant source of scattering. Dust loggers made it possible to study the ice structure resulting in a survey of ice dust layers, that have the effect of increasing the scattering and absorption light passing through. In these layers, the propagation of photons is not isotropic, but has a preferred direction: less scattering along the glacial flow in the x-y plane, and more along the z-axis. My work is a simulation of photon propagation through thin layers of dust, to study the photon arrival time distribution at a fixed distance from the emission point, by changing the properties of the ice, such as the albedo and the layer thickness.
