Performance Checks

The following scripts reproduce the plots in the paper which related to reconstruction and event selection performance. All scripts are within the pev-photons/performance_checks directory.

Effective Area

The effective area to gamma rays a function of true energy for all dataset years is illustrated by running:

python eff_area_comp.py --sigmoid --noBins

Figure 2: IceTop’s effective area to gamma rays simulated with snow heights from each year of the data-taking period of the analysis. All cuts listed in Section ref{sec:qc} were applied. In 2011 a pre-scaling factor of three was applied for events where the shower triggered less than eight stations which produces the lower effective area relative to the amount of snow.

Angular Resolution

To plot the angular resolution for gamma rays as a function of true energy for the 2011 and 2015 analysis years weighted to an \(E^{-2.0}\) spectrum, run:

python ang_res.py

Figure 3: Angular resolution to gamma rays from simulation using detector response with snow heights from the first and last year of the data-taking period of the analysis.

Angular Resolution

To plot the fraction of quality-cut level events that survive the gamma-hadron separation cut, run:

python passing_fraction.py

Figure 6: Fraction of events at the quality cut level which pass the gamma-hadron discrimination cut for gamma ray simulation and data as a function of energy. Both the point source and Galactic plane component event selections are shown.