Speaker
Description
Cherenkov radiation, produced by charged particles traveling above the phase velocity of light in dielectric media, has played a crucial role in neutrino detection. Facilities such as SuperK, KM3Net and IceCube rely on it to detect secondaries produced in neutrino interactions. At energies above approximately 10 GeV, neutrinos deep-inelastic scatter off of target nucleons, breaking them apart to produce hadron-initiated showers, with possibly an additional electromagnetic component depending on the interaction channel. Simulating these processes at energies above roughly 1 TeV can be computationally expensive, but is of importance for in the analysis and classification of astrophysical neutrinos. So far, experiments have resorted to parametrized approximations of averaged shower profiles when efficient simulation becomes necessary. In this talk, I will present a new construction of parameter distributions that are capable of describing the Cherenkov light yield from particle showers in ice or water. Sampling from the distributions is efficient and allows for a much improved description of event-to-event fluctuations, in amplitude and shape, along the shower axis. I will also outline some possible avenues for further improvements, which may become necessary for precision analyses at current and next-generation neutrino telescopes.