IceCube: neutrino astronomy in Antarctica

Tyce DeYoung (MSU Department of Physics and Astronomy) colloquium on high-energy astrophysics and exploration of the high-energy universe with the IceCube neutrino detector at the South Pole. Several MSU professors are part of the IceCube collaboration.

I predict very exciting developments in neutrino astronomy in the coming decade ;-)

The situation is similar to that for LIGO a few years ago. Events of significant scientific interest have already been seen with the detector at small (here small means instrumenting a cubic kilometer of ice!) fiducial volume. At a higher volume (10x or more scale up in IceCube anticipated upgrade), we therefore expect a robust new kind of astronomy to emerge, using a never before available probe of the universe -- for IceCube, high energy neutrinos, for LIGO, gravity waves. In both cases new insights into astrophysical black holes (and perhaps other very exotic objects) are likely to emerge.

Note the scale of the experiment in the image below -- in units of Eiffel Towers :-)