105 research outputs found
Cosmic Neutrinos and the Energy Budget of Galactic and Extragalactic Cosmic Rays
Although kilometer-scale neutrino detectors such as IceCube are discovery
instruments, their conceptual design is very much anchored to the observational
fact that Nature produces protons and photons with energies in excess of
10^{20} eV and 10^{13} eV, respectively. The puzzle of where and how Nature
accelerates the highest energy cosmic particles is unresolved almost a century
after their discovery. We will discuss how the cosmic ray connection sets the
scale of the anticipated cosmic neutrino fluxes. In this context, we discuss
the first results of the completed AMANDA detector and the science reach of its
extension, IceCube.Comment: 13 pages, Latex2e, 3 postscript figures included. Talk presented at
the International Workshop on Energy Budget in the High Energy Universe,
Kashiwa, Japan, February 200
Cosmic Neutrinos from the Sources of Galactic and Extragalactic Cosmic Rays
Although kilometer-scale neutrino detectors such as IceCube are discovery
instruments, their conceptual design is very much anchored to the observational
fact that Nature produces protons and photons with energies in excess of 10^20
eV and 10^13 eV, respectively. The puzzle of where and how Nature accelerates
the highest energy cosmic particles is unresolved almost a century after their
discovery. From energetics considerations we anticipate order 10~100 neutrino
events per kilometer squared per year pointing back at the source(s) of both
galactic and extragalactic cosmic rays. In this context, we discuss the results
of the AMANDA and IceCube neutrino telescopes which will deliver a
kilometer-square-year of data over the next 3 years.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure
An improved method for measuring muon energy using the truncated mean of dE/dx
The measurement of muon energy is critical for many analyses in large
Cherenkov detectors, particularly those that involve separating
extraterrestrial neutrinos from the atmospheric neutrino background. Muon
energy has traditionally been determined by measuring the specific energy loss
(dE/dx) along the muon's path and relating the dE/dx to the muon energy.
Because high-energy muons (E_mu > 1 TeV) lose energy randomly, the spread in
dE/dx values is quite large, leading to a typical energy resolution of 0.29 in
log10(E_mu) for a muon observed over a 1 km path length in the IceCube
detector. In this paper, we present an improved method that uses a truncated
mean and other techniques to determine the muon energy. The muon track is
divided into separate segments with individual dE/dx values. The elimination of
segments with the highest dE/dx results in an overall dE/dx that is more
closely correlated to the muon energy. This method results in an energy
resolution of 0.22 in log10(E_mu), which gives a 26% improvement. This
technique is applicable to any large water or ice detector and potentially to
large scintillator or liquid argon detectors.Comment: 12 pages, 16 figure
Measurement of spin correlation in ttbar production using dilepton final states
We measure the correlation between the spin of the top quark and the spin of
the anti-top quark in (ttbar -> W+ W- b bbar -> l+ nu b l- nubar bbar) final
states produced in ppbar collisions at a center of mass energy sqrt(s)=1.96
TeV, where l is an electron or muon. The data correspond to an integrated
luminosity of 5.4 fb-1 and were collected with the D0 detector at the Fermilab
Tevatron collider. The correlation is extracted from the angles of the two
leptons in the t and tbar rest frames, yielding a correlation strength C=
0.10^{+0.45}_{-0.45}, in agreement with the NLO QCD prediction within two
standard deviations, but also in agreement with the no correlation hypothesis.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, submitted to PL
Measurement of the ttbar production cross section using dilepton events in ppbar collisions
We present a measurement of the ttbar production cross section sigma(ttbar)
in ppbar collisions at sqrt{s} = 1.96 TeV using 5.4 fb-1 of integrated
luminosity collected with the D0 detector. We consider final states with at
least two jets and two leptons (ee, emu, mumu), and events with one jet for the
the emu final state as well. The measured cross section is sigma(ttbar)= 7.36
+0.90-0.79 (stat + syst) pb. This result combined with the cross section
measurement in the lepton + jets final state yields sigma(ttbar)=7.56
+0.63-0.56 (stat + syst) pb, which agrees with the standard model expectation.
The relative precision of 8% of this measurement is comparable to the latest
theoretical calculations.Comment: 9 pages, published in Phys. Lett.
Measurement of atmospheric tau neutrino appearance with IceCube DeepCore
We present a measurement of atmospheric tau neutrino appearance from oscillations with three years of data from the DeepCore subarray of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. This analysis uses atmospheric neutrinos from the full sky with reconstructed energies between 5.6 and 56 GeV to search for a statistical excess of cascadelike neutrino events which are the signature of ÎœÏ interactions. For CC+NC (CC-only) interactions, we measure the tau neutrino normalization to be 0.73âș·³â°-.ââ (0.57âș·³â¶-.ââ) and exclude the absence of tau neutrino oscillations at a significance of 3.2Ï (2.0Ï) These results are consistent with, and of similar precision to, a confirmatory IceCube analysis also presented, as well as measurements performed by other experiments.M.G. Aartsen ⊠G.C. Hill ⊠A. Kyriacou ⊠A. Wallace ⊠B.J. Whelan ⊠et al. (The IceCube Collaboration
High-dimensional maximum marginal likelihood item factor analysis by adaptive quadrature
Although the BockâAitkin likelihood-based estimation method for factor analysis of dichotomous item response data has important advantages over classical analysis of item tetrachoric correlations, a serious limitation of the method is its reliance on fixed-point Gauss-Hermite (G-H) quadrature in the solution of the likelihood equations and likelihood-ratio tests. When the number of latent dimensions is large, computational considerations require that the number of quadrature points per dimension be few. But with large numbers of items, the dispersion of the likelihood, given the response pattern, becomes so small that the likelihood cannot be accurately evaluated with the sparse fixed points in the latent space. In this paper, we demonstrate that substantial improvement in accuracy can be obtained by adapting the quadrature points to the location and dispersion of the likelihood surfaces corresponding to each distinct pattern in the data. In particular, we show that adaptive G-H quadrature, combined with mean and covariance adjustments at each iteration of an EM algorithm, produces an accurate fast-converging solution with as few as two points per dimension. Evaluations of this method with simulated data are shown to yield accurate recovery of the generating factor loadings for models of upto eight dimensions. Unlike an earlier application of adaptive Gibbs sampling to this problem by Meng and Schilling, the simulations also confirm the validity of the present method in calculating likelihood-ratio chi-square statistics for determining the number of factors required in the model. Finally, we apply the method to a sample of real data from a test of teacher qualifications.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43596/1/11336_2003_Article_1141.pd
A muon-track reconstruction exploiting stochastic losses for large-scale Cherenkov detectors
IceCube is a cubic-kilometer Cherenkov telescope operating at the South Pole. The main goal of IceCube is the detection of astrophysical neutrinos and the identification of their sources. High-energy muon neutrinos are observed via the secondary muons produced in charge current interactions with nuclei in the ice. Currently, the best performing muon track directional reconstruction is based on a maximum likelihood method using the arrival time distribution of Cherenkov photons registered by the experiment\u27s photomultipliers. A known systematic shortcoming of the prevailing method is to assume a continuous energy loss along the muon track. However at energies >1 TeV the light yield from muons is dominated by stochastic showers. This paper discusses a generalized ansatz where the expected arrival time distribution is parametrized by a stochastic muon energy loss pattern. This more realistic parametrization of the loss profile leads to an improvement of the muon angular resolution of up to 20% for through-going tracks and up to a factor 2 for starting tracks over existing algorithms. Additionally, the procedure to estimate the directional reconstruction uncertainty has been improved to be more robust against numerical errors
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