The IceCube Neutrino Detector at the South Pole Hits Paydirt

[dekhn]

My coworker went down to the South Pole to install Debian on the IceCube cluster (funny story: it's hard to cool servers there because the air is really dry) ~14 years ago. Basically, a 48 hour trip both ways just to insert a CD and press reset. We were all jealous.

[chris_mc]

> just to insert a CD and press reset

That may have been all he did that time, but imagine if stuff had gone sideways, he'd have to troubleshoot it from Antarctica! I thought working from home was bad...

[DannyB2]

I would have thought that for the time and cost of doing that, they could just ship the CD with a booklet of photographic instructions. An instruction manual SO SIMPLE that even a scientist at the South Pole could understand it. Or they could make a video chat call and it could be explained.

(I don't mean scientists are so dumb, but that they might have Antarctic Stare...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_T3_syndrome

[throwa_way_]

>it's hard to cool servers there because the air is really dry

Not sure how this could be the case. Dry air has higher thermal conductivity than moist air.

[nategri]

Recovering astroparticle physics PhD here.

I read this news with great interest because I thought they might have finally detected the flux of neutrinos predicted by the GZK process[1]. But, this can't be the case because 1) 10^14 eV is probably on the low side for GZK neutrinos, and (more importantly!) 2) that flux would be fairly isotropic, and not from point source.

But still! Exciting results! IceCube is an ambitious and wonderful detector and I'm always pleased to see it in the news.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greisen%E2%80%93Zatsepin%E2%80...

[8bitsrule]

Curious: alcoholics have Bill Wilson to help them recover ... who do astrophysicists have?

(the kind of question that reveals search engine limitations)

[cozzyd]

Nah, the IceCube neutrinos are probably photonuclear with local photons rather than CMB photons.

[Diederich]

> Recovering astroparticle physics PhD here

If I may ask: why 'recovering'?

[Tiki]

I'm just in awe that we're coordinating events world wide based on particle interactions one of which originated billions of light years away. That we're able to understand a little more about the vast space we live in because of it, the human cooperation, the technology, the amount of curiosity it took to get here, it's beautiful.

[bacon_waffle]

Totally! IceCube is such an amazing combination of great people, great Science, great engineering, and a completely amazing place where it all comes together (places, really, both Madison WI and South Pole ;) ). And, as you say, IceCube is just one project involved in this discovery.

All that effort focused on one incomprehensibly small neutrino...

[southpolesteve]

I worked on this project in college and went down to the south pole after graduation to help install some of the detectors. Neat to see the results! ~10 years later.

[bmease]

The scientists at the IceCube Neutrino Detector are currently doing an AMA on reddit[0] for those interested.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/8yajhh/were_scientist...

[phyzome]

Off-topic: Imagine discovering the IceCube detector 10,000 years from now, and trying to figure out what it was for.

[ggambetta]

If archaeologists 10k years in the future are like their present day counterparts, they'll conclude it was built for ritual purposes :)

[bacon_waffle]

I guess the details will depend on whether it happens before or after the discovery of the giant poo-bergs nearby :).

[FatherPaulStone]

Nice article. Some guys in my place are working on a new machine which generates and detects neutrinos. It's called DUNE. It uses a super conducting linear proton accelerator to generate them and 100s of massive liquid helium cooled wire detectors 800miles away! Super exciting project.

[gattr]

If anyone's interested in other unusual (i.e. other than an optical imaging telescope) detectors, have a look at Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes [0]. More details can be found e.g. in [1].

TL;DR: how to detect a very high-energy gamma-ray photon? Either with an orbital observatory (but these have limited size); or let the photon hit upper atmosphere (at a few tens of km), create (together with some atmospheric nucleus) a fast electron-positron pair, which through additional interactions eventually causes a narrow cone of Cherenkov light to shine all the way down to the ground (having ~100 m diameter there), and then gather this light with an array of a few large reflectors. Finally, perform some tricky processing to recover the initial photon's direction and energy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IACT [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.05675

[King-Aaron]

I'm honestly in awe of that diagram of the detector. I'd seen pictures of the surface structure of the lab, but I had no idea there was an antenna array nearly two and a half kilometres deep..

[js2]

ieee link includes an interstitial and then fails to load the article for me, probably my ad blocker. Alternate reporting:

https://www.npr.org/2018/07/12/628142995/a-4-billion-light-y...

[jen729w]

The original is worth the read, it’s excellent.

http://archive.is/T9DB4

[Latteland]

What a great story. That article was inspiring and easy to understand. It makes me proud to be a human, really!

[IrishJourno]

Thanks! :)