ShineFit Time-informed reconstruction of cosmic neutrino showers

At the height of the Cold War, in 1960, a physics conference in Rochester, NY, received Soviet physicist Mosey Markov. He proposed building a new type of telescope to observe the neutrino, a notoriously elusive particle. The location of this proposed detector was unheard of in particle physics: the bottom of the sea.
Today, we call these detectors Cherenkov neutrino telescopes. They are being used to elucidate a century-old problem in astronomy: where do the highest energy particles in the universe come from? To answer this question, KM3NeT, a next generation neutrino telescope, is currently being built at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea. With a better resolution than its predecessors, KM3NeT is able to take sharper pictures of neutrinos. With this edge, the KM3NeT collaboration hopes to convincingly identify an object in space that produces this cosmic hail.
The research done for this thesis produced a new description of what neutrinos look like in our detector, and in particular, how this signal evolves in time. With this description, we built a new algorithm called ShineFit. For one of the two types of signals in our detector, it improved the angular resolution of KM3NeT by 40%, and increased its operational volume by a third. These improvements lead to an earlier and more precise study of cosmic neutrino showers.