Improving Track Reco with Standard Arrows in IceCube

Parallel talk presented at the XXI International Workshop on Neutrino Telescopes - Padova 29 September - 3 October 2025 (https://agenda.infn.it/event/44606/) On behalf of the IceCube Collaboration Abstract: Reconstructing the incoming direction of muons is a fundamental task in neutrino astronomy. In water- and ice-Cherenkov telescopes, accurate muon reconstruction is important to the entire span of an analysis, from background rejection to accurately determining the position of neutrino point sources. It is therefore crucial to both optimize and understand the performance of muon track reconstruction in neutrino telescopes. In this talk, we introduce the idea of “standard arrows,” muons with an enhanced pointing precision enabled by their interaction with a small plastic scintillator detector deployed inside of an optical module. Because of their exquisite pointing resolution, we expect standard arrow datasets can have wide applicability in neutrino telescopes, including verifying muon reconstruction algorithms and serving as training sets for machine learning models. Lastly, we will detail R&D efforts on such a scintillator detector to be deployed as part of the IceCube Upgrade, along with its expected performance.