The Penn State IceCube group uses IceCube DeepCore and its atmospheric neutrino sample to study fundamental properties of neutrinos:

• Muon neutrino disappearance
  • High statistics analysis (former grad student Dr. Matt Dunkman)
• Tau neutrino appearance
  • High statistics analysis (Ms. Feifei Huang, Dr. Philipp Eller)

We have provided the event reconstruction that gives PINGU the direction and energy resolutions required for fundamental neutrino measurements:

• PINGU event reconstruction (Dr. Philipp Eller, Ms. Feifei Huang and Mr. Justin Lanfranchi)
• Neutrino Mass Ordering (Mr. Justin Lanfranchi)
• Tau neutrino appearance (Ms. Feifei Huang, Dr. Philipp Eller)

We are working on new reconstruction algorithms to improve resolutions and give us better understanding of our systematics:

• RetroReco (Mr. Kevin Crust, Dr. Philipp Eller, Mr. Justin Lanfranchi)

The largest background to our neutrino signal comes from cosmic-ray muons.  We are working to apply IceCube’s Enhanced Starting Track Event Selection (ESTES) algorithm to low energy neutrinos in order to remove this background while keeping as much signal as possible:

• Muon background reduction with ESTES (Ms. Daria Pankova)

We have studied the performance requirements for PINGU hardware and developed prototype firmware that will reside in each deployed module in the ice:

• PINGU module dynamic range and timing requirements (Ms. Feifei Huang)
• PINGU firmware development (Dr. Tyler Anderson, Ms. Daria Pankova and undergrads Ms. Sabrina Pellegrini, Ms. Melissa Quinnan and Mr. Matthew Weiss)

We have co-developed the analysis package PISA for use with low energy neutrino data (Dr. Philipp Eller, Mr. Justin Lanfranchi, Mr. Matthew Weiss)