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Towards a cosmic ray composition measurement with the IceAct telescopes at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

  • The IceCube Collaboration
  • South Dakota School of Mines & Technology
  • Loyola University Chicago
  • German Electron Synchrotron
  • University of Canterbury
  • University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Institute of Physics Bhubaneswar
  • Université libre de Bruxelles
  • University of Copenhagen
  • TU Dortmund University
  • University of Delaware
  • Marquette University
  • Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg
  • Harvard University
  • University of Utah
  • University of California at Irvine
  • University of California at Berkeley
  • Ohio State University
  • Ruhr University Bochum
  • Chalmers University of Technology
  • Uppsala University
  • Technical University of Munich
  • RWTH Aachen University
  • University of Rochester
  • University of Maryland, College Park
  • University of Padua
  • University of Kansas
  • Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
  • Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
  • GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research
  • Georgia Institute of Technology
  • University of Adelaide
  • University of Münster
  • Drexel University

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is equipped with the unique possibility to measure cosmic ray induced air showers simultaneously by their particle footprint on the surface with the IceTop detector and by the high-energy muonic shower component at a depth of more than 1.5 km. Since 2019 additionally two Imaging Air Cherenkov Telescopes, called IceAct, measure the electromagnetic component of air showers in the atmosphere above the IceCube detector. This opens the possibility to measure air shower parameters in three independent detectors and allows to improve mass composition studies with the IceCube data. One IceAct camera consists of 61 SiPM pixels in a hexagonal grid. Each pixel has a field of view of 1.5 degree resulting in an approximately 12-degree field of view per camera. A single telescope tube has a diameter of 50 cm, is built robust enough to withstand the harsh Antarctic conditions, and is able to detect cosmic ray particles with energies above approximately 10 TeV. A Graph Neural Network (GNN) is trained to determine the air shower properties from IceAct data. The composition analysis is then performed using Random Forest Regression (RF). Since all three detectors have a different energy threshold, we train several RFs with different inputs, combining the different detectors and taking advantage of the lower energy threshold of the IceAct telescopes. This will result in composition measurements for different detector combinations and enables cross-checks of the results in overlapping energy bands. We present the method, parameters for data selection, and the status of this analysis.

Original languageEnglish
Article number237
JournalProceedings of Science
Volume444
StatePublished - Sep 27 2024
Event38th International Cosmic Ray Conference, ICRC 2023 - Nagoya, Japan
Duration: Jul 26 2023Aug 3 2023

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