Speaker
Mr
Volker Baum
(Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
Description
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory was mainly designed to detect highly energetic neutrinos with its lattice of
5160 photomultiplier tubes monitoring 1 cubic kilometer of clear Antarctic ice. Due to low photomultiplier dark
noise rates in the cold and inert ice, IceCube is also able to detect several-second-long bursts of O(10 MeV)
neutrinos expected to be emitted from galactic core collapse supernovae. Observing a collective rise in all
photomultiplier rates, IceCube would provide the world’s highest statistical precision for nearby supernovae.
In this talk, I will present the supernova data acquisition system, the search algorithms for galactic supernovae,
the IceCube escalation scheme following a serious alert, the role of IceCube as a member of the supernova
early warning system SNEWS, as well as the recently implemented HitSpooling DAQ extension. HitSpooling
will overcome the current limitation of transmitting photomultiplier rates in intervals of 1.6384 ms by storing all
recorded time-stamped hits for supernova candidate triggers. From the corresponding event-based
information, the average neutrino energy can be estimated and the background induced by detector noise
and atmospheric muons can be reduced.
Primary author
Mr
Volker Baum
(Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
