The IceCube data acquisition system for galactic core collapse supernova searches

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory was designed to detect highly energetic neutrinos. The detector was built as a lattice of 5160 photomultiplier tubes monitoring one cubic kilometer of clear Antarctic ice. Due to low photomultiplier dark noise rates in the cold and radio-pure ice, IceCube is also able to detect bursts of O(10MeV) neutrinos expected to be emitted from core collapse supernovae. The detector will provide the world’s highest statistical precision for the lightcurves of galactic supernovae by observing an induced collective rise in all photomultiplier rates [1]. This paper presents the supernova data acquisition system, the search algorithms for galactic supernovae, as well as the recently implemented HitSpooling DAQ extension. HitSpooling will overcome the current limitation of transmitting photomultiplier rates in intervals of 1.6384 ms by storing all recorded time-stamped hits for supernova candidate triggers. From the corresponding event-based information, the average neutrino energy can be estimated and the background induced by detector noise and atmospheric muons can be reduced.