IceCube is the proposed next stage of our detector. To learn more about the IceCube project click here.
One of the projects I worked on was creating cascade events in IceCube using Monte Carlo simulations. To the right is a picture of one of the events that I created in the spring of 2000.
A cascade event happens when an electron muon enters our detector. The light that comes from such an event is given off in a radial direction.
In the picture here, each black dot corresponds to a optical module. The colored circles represent modules that have been hit by one or more photons. The more photons that hit the module, the larger the colored circle. The colors of the circle correspond to the time that the module was hit. Red are early times and purple are later times.
To the left you see a picture of the expected angular resolution of the detector as a funtion of the Muon Energy. To the right is a graph of the expected angular resolution of the detector as a function of zenith angle for different energy ranges.
There is little change in the resolution of the dector above 10 TeV as we change the energy. We do notice some fluctions between 1 TeV and 10 TeV. The reason for this is that lower energy events will often run out of energy while in the detector, ie they "stop". This provides us a smaller lever arm to reconstruct the muon's direction with.
The other fluctuation in angular resolution that you might notice is that for zenith angles close to verticle our resolution is poorer. The reason for this is that a vertically going muon has more of a chance to go through the detector without firing an optical module than on that comes in horizontally or with a larger angle.
Another project that I have worked on is looking at SPASE coincident events in the IceCube detector. SPASE is a cosmic ray detector at the surface of the ice. Katherine Rawlins is the graduate student at University of Wisconsin who works on SPASE/AMANDA coincident events.
The primary cosmic ray for the event on the left was a proton with an energy of 10 PeV.The number of muons at the top of the detector was 89 and the number at the bottom of the detector was 22. The one muon radius of this bundle is 60 meters.
For more information about the SPASE detector can be found at http://www.bartol.udel.edu/spase .
To the right is a view of the same event from the top of the detector.