Performance Studies for the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE)

The Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE) is a proposed undersea neutrino detector off the shore of British Columbia, Canada, aimed at the study of astrophysical neutrinos. An excellent directional reconstruction is crucial for a neutrino telescope to pinpoint the origins of detected astrophysical neutrino events. Deploying P-ONE in the deep-sea environment will enable directional reconstruction of track-like events to a resolution at or below a tenth of a degree. In this work, we present a maximum likelihood-based track reconstruction method and evaluate it using Monte Carlo simulations. Recorded light pulses are evaluated using pre-computed arrival time distributions of Cherenkov photons at optical modules as functions of track parameters. We present the reconstructed angular resolution and the anticipated neutrino effective area for various detector designs with different geometries. We use these to estimate the corresponding discovery potential of the P-ONE, the flux needed to discover a point source of astrophysical neutrinos.