Evaluating the depth dependence of atmospheric muons with the first string of the KM3NeT/ORCA detector

KM3NeT is a international collaboration focused on neutrino telescopy. Its main goals are to detect high energy cosmological objects through neutrino detection and reveal the neutrino mass hierarchy. For this it uses two detectors, the ARCA detector which is constructed on the coast of Italy and the ORCA detector which had its first two detection strings deployed in the fall of 2017. In this thesis we focus on measuring the background produced by muons generated in atmospheric events. This will allow us to gain an estimation of the expected background from which we obtain an indication of the performance of the detector. We have used two methods of filtering uncorrelated backgrounds such as the signals produced by decay of 40K in the ocean to extract atmospheric signals. Through the two methods we have found two halving lengths of muons flux in the water of the Mediterranean. A halving length of 239 meters for the method filtering low energy hits and a halving length of 267 meters...Show moreKM3NeT is a international collaboration focused on neutrino telescopy. Its main goals are to detect high energy cosmological objects through neutrino detection and reveal the neutrino mass hierarchy. For this it uses two detectors, the ARCA detector which is constructed on the coast of Italy and the ORCA detector which had its first two detection strings deployed in the fall of 2017. In this thesis we focus on measuring the background produced by muons generated in atmospheric events. This will allow us to gain an estimation of the expected background from which we obtain an indication of the performance of the detector. We have used two methods of filtering uncorrelated backgrounds such as the signals produced by decay of 40K in the ocean to extract atmospheric signals. Through the two methods we have found two halving lengths of muons flux in the water of the Mediterranean. A halving length of 239 meters for the method filtering low energy hits and a halving length of 267 meters for signals extracted by correlations between DOMs. The results give a good estimation of the order of magnitude of muon decay through increasing depths, however we have found systematic artifacts in the DOMs, which are expected to be caused by differences in the DOM efficiencies. For this reason further research is required to obtain a definitive result.Show less

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Evaluating the depth dependence of atmospheric muons with the first string of the KM3NeT/ORCA detector