Description:
Neutrinos are unique messengers to study the high-energy Universe as they are neutral and stable, interact weakly and therefore travel directly from their point of creation to the Earth without absorption. Nowadays, the sources of very high-energy cosmic rays are still unkown. The detection of a neutrino signal is a direct evidence of the sources and the proof of the hadronic mechanism that produced the cosmic rays.
KM3NeT is the second generation neutrino detector in the Mediteranean Sea. It will be distributed in two sites: a low energy site ORCA in France (5 GeV-10 TeV) and an high energy site ARCA in Italy (1 TeV-10 PeV). Both detectors will have a sensitivity largely improved compared to ANTARES at low and high energies. The French site is located at 2500 m depth in the Mediterranean Sea, 40 km off Toulon close-by ANTARES. The infrastructure is already deployed in both sites and the first lines should be deployed by the beginning of 2017. The completion of the KM3NeT is expected to be achieved around 2020. High-energy neutrino physics is a young and an almost unexplored field, which owns much discovery potentials. IceCube, a complementary neutrino detector in the South Pole has already discovered the first cosmic neutrinos, however their origins are stll unknown. This garanties to have neutrino signal detections in KM3NeT.
The main goal of the thesis is to develop the real-time analysis in the two KM3NeT detectors to look for transient sources such as gamma-ray burst, fast radio burst, supernovae… To achieve this goal, the student will have to develop a real-time neutrino track/shower reconstruction algorithm. The student will perform the study of the neutrino alert definition based on the constraints of the telescope’s avaliabilities and the data rate. At CPPM, we have developed for ANTARES a real-time alert system (named TAToO) that triggers multi-wavelength observatories. The student will also participate to the development of the alert sending system and the multi-wavelength follow-ups (radio, visible, X-ray and VHE) of the interesting neutrino directions. With this mehod, one neutrino could lead to a major discovery. In addition to the track event topology resulting from muon neutrino events, already exploited by the ANTARES alert system, the KM3NeT event reconstructions will allow sending triggers from cascade events (electron and tau neutrinos) with a quite good angular precision. The project will be done in closed collaboration with our astronomer colleagues from the Astrophysic Laboratory of Marseille (LAM), the Observatory of Haute Provence (OHP) and the Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP). As CPPM is the host lab of KM3NeT, the student will participate to the installation during sea campaign, the calibration and the data analysis of the first lines.
The candidate should therefore have a good background in astroparticle physics and astrophysics and interest in the data analysis. The analyses will be performed using C++, python and Root on Linux platforms.
References :
[1] ANTARES : http://antares.in2p3.fr
[2] KM3NeT : http://www.km3net.org
/> [3] https://www.cppm.in2p3.fr/article.php3?id_article=1121〈=en
[4] https://www.cppm.in2p3.fr/article.php3?id_article=1123〈=en
[5] http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.4477
/> [6] http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.01180
/> [7] http://marwww.in2p3.fr/~amathieu/these_Aurore.pdf