Cosmogenic background suppression in ICARUS using a Time-of-Flight Method

The ICARUS detector will operate at shallow depth and therefore it will be exposed to the full surface flux of cosmic rays. This poses a problematic background to the electron neutrino appearance analysis. A direct way to suppress this background is to surround the cryostat with a detector capable of tagging incident cosmic muons with high efficiency (~95\%). A cosmic ray tagger (CRT) has been produced based on extruded organic scintillator, wavelength-shifting fibers, and silicon photomultipliers and multi-anode photomultiplier tubes. The system is about 70% installed. A full detector simulation of the CRT system has been implemented, and a large cosmogenic sample, generated via CORSIKA, has been produced. In this talk, I will present the time-of-flight method for cosmogenic background suppression in ICARUS and their application to first data from the partially commissioned CRT system.