Repo for class project: modeling movement of deep sea bioluminescent organisms for background simulations for undersea neutrino telescopes
Deep sea neutrino telescopes are designed to observe neutrino induced Cherenkov light in the depths of the ocean. However, there are other sources of light in the deep sea, primarily radioactivity and bioluminescence that contribute to the detector background. It is critical to understand these detector backgrounds to enable accurate reconstruction of incoming neutrinos.
Bioluminescence is emitted by many different organisms in the ocean of varying sizes (0.2mm to 2m). These organisms can emit light on collision with another object, on experienceing a shear force, or spontaneously.
A) Obtain a spatial likelihood space of bioluminescent emission points
B) Model specific trajectories to study emission signals from individual organisms
- Combine many simulations of organism trajectories into a spatial likelihood for emission
Organism trajectories are modeled using the ocean current field around a neutrino telescope module as a drift to the random walk. We can use this general SDE to calculate each step of the trajectory:
Here are some samples were modeled for two different organism behavour models, one random walk idle drift and one predator area search:
