* Astronomy

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IceCube telescope

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RE: IceCube

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IceCube Neutrino Observatory

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IceCube telescope

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IceCube

Blobrana · L

As the 2008-09 Antarctic drilling season concludes, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory is on track to be finished as planned in 2011.
The observatory is an enormous telescope designed to capture evidence of elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos released by distant cosmic events like exploding stars. Built directly into the ice covering Antarctica, IceCube uses the Earth to filter out lower-energy particles and focus instead on the highest energy neutrinos that carry information about supernovas, dark matter, gamma-ray bursts and other exotic cosmological mysteries.

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University of Delaware (UD) scientists and engineers are currently working at South Pole under very harsh conditions. This research team is one of the many other ones working on the construction of IceCube, the world's largest neutrino telescope in the Antarctic ice, far beneath the continent's snow-covered surface. When it is completed in 2011, the telescope array will occupy a cubic kilometre of Antarctica. One of the lead researchers said that 'IceCube will provide new information about some of the most violent and far-away astrophysical events in the cosmos.' The UD team has even opened a blog to cover this expedition. It will be opened up to December 22, 2008.

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Title: IceCube: A Cubic Kilometer Radiation Detector
Authors: Spencer R. Klein, for the IceCube Collaboration
(Version v2)

IceCube is a 1 km^3 neutrino detector now being built at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. It consists of 4800 Digital Optical Modules (DOMs) which detect Cherenkov radiation from the charged particles produced in neutrino interactions. IceCube will observe astrophysical neutrinos with energies above about 100 GeV. IceCube will be able to separate \nu_\mu, \nu_e and \nu_\tau interactions because of their different topologies. IceCube construction is currently 50% complete.

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IceCube, which is due to be completed by 2011, aims to find elusive neutrinos. It will use 80 strings of detectors buried within the ice at the South Pole. The detectors look for a track of light that is produced when a neutrino interacts with ice and spits out a muon, which itself then streaks through the ice.
Unfortunately, about a million times as many muons are actually produced in Earth's atmosphere. To prevent such muons from being confused with those produced in the ice by neutrinos, IceCube will focus on "upward-going" neutrinos that come through the Earth from the northern hemisphere. That will ensure that the intervening rock blocks out atmospheric muons from northern skies.
But this perspective means IceCube will miss out on neutrinos that may arise from exotic processes in objects in the southern sky, such as the decay of dark matter. The exact nature of dark matter is unknown, but most physicists think it is made up of weakly interacting massive particles.

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A giant telescope buried in ice at the South Pole could one day create pictures of the Earths core. According to a new calculation, the instrument called IceCube could produce a picture of the Earth's dense iron core, silhouetted against the lighter rocky mantle.
Currently under construction, IceCube is designed to detect subatomic particles called neutrinos, which are so evasive that they can slip quite easily through the body of the planet.
A few neutrinos are not so lucky, however, and deep under the South Pole IceCube is designed to spot them. The machine consists of thousands of detectors and will eventually fill a cubic kilometre of ice. The detectors look downwards, watching for the distinctive flash of blue light that means a neutrino has come through most of the planet only to get snagged in the Antarctic ice.
The main aim is to look for neutrinos from exotic objects in deep space, such as the giant black holes in galactic cores, using the bulk of the Earth as a shield to screen out unwanted noise from other cosmic particles.

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Title: Imaging the Internal Structure of the Earth with Atmospheric Neutrinos
Authors: M.C. Gonzalez-Garcia, Francis Halzen, Michele Maltoni, Hiroyuki K.M. Tanaka

The possibility of doing tomography of the Earth's structure using a cosmic neutrino beam has been extensively studied since it was first suggested more than twenty five years ago. The absorption of neutrinos with energies in excess of 10 TeV when traversing the Earth is capable of revealing its density distribution. Unfortunately, the existence of beams with sufficient luminosity for the task has been ruled out by the AMANDA South Pole neutrino telescope. In this letter we point out that, with the advent of second-generation kilometre-scale neutrino detectors, the idea of studying the internal structure of the Earth may be revived using atmospheric neutrinos instead. We show that a direct observation of the core of the Earth may be possible using the high statistics data samples collected by IceCube. By giving direct evidence on the Earth's interior, the observation is complementary to indirect geophysical measurements.

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