Bi-Weekly IIHE Internal Seminar: David Heereman, "HitSpooling - A novel data acquisition system for Supernova Detection with IceCube"

Monday 19 May 2014, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Brussels

Universe

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory was designed to detect neutrinos at energies greater than 100 GeV. Due to subfreezing temperatures, the photomultipliers' dark noise rates are particularly low. This enables IceCube to search for neutrinos from galactic supernovae by measuring an increase in the overall hit number, called scalers, in the detector coming from the Cherenkov light of interactions of MeV neutrinos in the ice . A new feature to the standard DAQ, called HitSpooling, is running in IceCube since 2013. By buffering the untriggered hit information of the photomultipliers we have access to the full raw data stream of the detector in case of a supernova. In combination with the standard scaler data, the HitSpooling feature leads to a better understanding of background processes coming from atmospheric muons and instrumental noise.