Role of Group and Phase Velocity in High-Energy Neutrino Observatories

Abstract

Kuzmichev recently showed that use of phase velocity rather than group velocity for Cherenkov light signals and pulses from calibration lasers in high-energy neutrino telescopes leads to errors in track reconstruction and distance measurement. We amplify on his remarks and show that errors for four cases of interest to AMANDA, IceCube, and RICE (radio Cherenkov detector) are negligibly small.