This lecture was delivered in October 2012 by Francis Halzen, director of the Institute for Elementary Particle Physics Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
n it, Halzen reveals how the IceCube experiment, installed beneath the ice at the South Pole, has become a neutrino telescope capable of detecting signals from the most energetic phenomena in the cosmos. He describes its design, featuring thousands of optical sensors buried up to 2.5 km deep, capable of recording the faint Cherenkov light generated when a neutrino interacts in the ice.
Drawing on hundreds of thousands of events, he outlines the methods used to distinguish astrophysical sources from terrestrial noise. He then illustrates how these data make it possible to trace the direction and energy of cosmic neutrinos, thus exploring new messengers to study black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and the origin of cosmic
This lecture was delivered in October 2012 by Francis Halzen, director of the Institute for Elementary Particle Physics Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
n it, Halzen reveals how the IceCube experiment, installed beneath the ice at the South Pole, has become a neutrino telescope capable of detecting signals from the most energetic phenomena in the cosmos. He describes its design, featuring thousands of optical sensors buried up to 2.5 km deep, capable of recording the faint Cherenkov light generated when a neutrino interacts in the ice.
Drawing on hundreds of thousands of events, he outlines the methods used to distinguish astrophysical sources from terrestrial noise. He then illustrates how these data make it possible to trace the direction and energy of cosmic neutrinos, thus exploring new messengers to study black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and the origin of cosmic rays.
This lecture is part of the astrophysics series ‘The Science of the Cosmos, the Science in the Cosmos’, tackles the fundamental questions in contemporary astrophysics. How many planets similar to Earth are orbiting other stars? The lectures in the second edition explore questions such as the search for life in other worlds, the expansion of the universe, neutron stars, and clusters of galaxies.
