Improvement in Fast Particle Track Reconstruction with Robust Statistics

The IceCube project has transformed 1 km of deep natural Antarctic ice into a Cherenkov detector. Muon neutrinos are detected and their direction is inferred by mapping the light produced by the secondary muon track inside the volume instrumented with photomultipliers. Reconstructing the muon track from the observed light is challenging due to noise, light scattering in the ice medium, and the possibility of simultaneously having multiple muons inside the detector, resulting from the large flux of cosmic ray muons. n Corresponding author. Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, 330 N. Orchard St., Madison, WI 53715, USA. Tel.: þ1 304 542 4464. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] (M. Wellons). 1 Physics Department, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, SD 57701, USA. 2 Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA. 3 Sezione INFN, Dipartimento di Fisica, I-70126 Bari, Italy. 4 NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA. M.G. Aartsen et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 736 (2014) 143–149 144