One of the primary goals of ANTARES is the identification of astrophysical neutrino sources, whose signature would appear as clusters of events at given coordinates in the sky. The ANTARES data used for this search are therefore a set of reconstructed neutrino arrival directions (in equatorial coordinates: right ascension RA, declination dec).
The significance of a neutrino excess from a given sky position must be assessed over the expected background fluctuations using, for instance the Feldman-Cousins statistics [Phys.Rev.D57:3873-3889,1998].
The significance of a neutrino excess from a given sky position must be assessed over the expected background fluctuations using, for instance the Feldman-Cousins statistics [Phys.Rev.D57:3873-3889,1998](https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.57.3873).
The background is represented by atmospheric neutrinos: neutrinos originating from cosmic ray interactions in the Earth's atmosphere. Their arrival directions are isotropically distributed over the Earth's atmosphere, and result, at the ANTARES detector, uniform in right ascension and with a distribution in declination that depends on the detector geographical position (latitude).
This use case is using ANTARES data and allows to inspect a sample of neutrino arrival directions in equatorial coordinates (RA, dec), evaluate the expected background rate for a user-selected sky position, and finally assess the significance of a cluster defined as all arrival directions that fall inside a given radius, selected by the user and indicated here 'region of interest' (RoI).
