The combined AMANDA and IceCube Neutrino Telescope

Abstract

The IceCube Neutrino Telescope is currently under construction at the geographic South Pole and will eventually instrument a volume of one cubic kilometer by 2011. It currently consists of 22 strings with 60 Digital Optical Modules each. Additionally the AMANDA detector has been fully integrated into IceCube operation. This includes hardware synchronisation, combined triggering, common event building and a combined data analysis strategy. Monte Carlo simulations of a combined AMANDA + IceCube detector will be presented. The results of the simulations were used to implement an online filtering on data provided by the Joint Event Builder collecting data from both detectors. Data taken synchronously from both detectors serve for Monte Carlo verification. We discuss the impact of the AMANDA integration on the effective area, track reconstruction and event selection for themuon neutrino detection channel. In particular, we study fully and partially contained events at low energy. An online filtermarks candidates for contained events using peripheral opticalmodules as a veto against atmospheric muons. The effective interaction volume for this filter is presented.