IceCube Neutrino Lab
November 16, 2009 - January 1, 2010 | South Pole Station, Antarctica
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Now archived! The real-time event with Casey and the IceCube team on Friday, 11 December 2009 at the South Pole. Access the archive here.
Casey O'Hara has worked in the past as a mechanical engineer designing robots and implantable medical devices, but for the fast five years he has been teaching physics and integrated science at Carlmont High School. Curiosity drives his passion for teaching science, as it affords him the opportunity to constantly learn new things while helping his students learn. Mr. O'Hara's students apply physics to design, build, and perform on their own musical instruments, finding connections between physics and music. When not in the classroom, Mr. O'Hara likes to appease his curiosity through travel, mostly to tropical climates and warm beaches. Mr. O'Hara thinks that participating in the IceCube project will be an amazing opportunity to experience cutting edge physics research, and hopes that during his visit to the South Pole he will, in addition, witness climate change research.
Jim Madsen has been at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls (UWRF) since 1989, and is currently a professor of physics and chair of the Physics Department. He has been involved with the IceCube project and its predecessor, AMANDA (Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array), for about a decade. Dr. Madsen's original contribution to the project was to investigate the performance of the IceCube neutrino telescope using computer simulations. More recently, he has been working on the surface detectors, which form an array at the South Pole known as IceTop. In addition to the research, Dr. Madsen does education and outreach for the IceCube project including professional development courses for teachers and science and math instruction for the UWRF Upward Bound Program. His research interests include condensed matter and astrophysics, and he has worked with numerous undergraduate students and teachers on his various projects in Antarctica.
Francis Halzen, the Principal investigator of the IceCube project, originally conceived the idea to use the ice at the South Pole to track high-energy neutrinos. Dr. Halzen is the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Professor at the University Wisconsin-Madison where he does particle physics, cosmology, and astrophysics theory. Dr. Halzen is a strong believer in the power of cutting-edge science to engage people at all levels, and values the opportunities to bring IceCube science to the classroom.
The current spokesperson for the IceCube collaboration is Tom Gaisser. He is the Martin A. Pomerantz Professor of Physics at the Univesity of Delaware. Tom is a well known astroparticle and cosmic ray physicist who promoted the concept of an array of detectors on the surface as part of IceCube.. Tom has been instrumental in getting an Antarctic Research page up at the University of Delaware where he and others have posted blogs from the South Pole.
A large international team of scientists and drilling technicians will be working throughout the austral summer to continue to assemble and test the world's largest scientific instrument, the in-ice IceCube Neutrino Detector that is about 75% complete. Neutrinos are incredibly common (about 10 million pass through your body as you read this) subatomic particles that have no electric charge and almost no mass. They are created by radioactive decay and nuclear reactions, such as those on the Sun and other stars. Neutrinos rarely react with other particles or forces; in fact, most of them pass through objects (like you, or the entire earth) without any interaction. This makes them ideal for carrying information from distant parts of the universe, but it also makes them very hard to detect. All neutrino detectors rely on observing the extremely rare instances when a neutrino does collide with a proton. This collision transforms the neutrino into a muon, a charged particle that can travel for 5-10 miles and generate detectable light.
IceCube is being constructed in Antarctica because the huge amount of dense ice under the South Pole contains a lot of protons that can be hit by passing neutrinos, and the ice is transparent, so the resulting light can be caught by sensors. IceCube is made up of 4200 sensitive light detectors embedded in the ice at depths between 1450 and 2450 meters (4700-8000 feet). The sensors are deployed on "strings" of 60 modules each, into holes 60 cm. in diameter in the ice melted using a hot water drill. Covering about one square kilometer, IceCube expands on an existing experiment that started detecting neutrinos at the South Pole in 1997 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5qS9Beo6x4). When IceCube is complete, in 2010, it may detect up to 300,000 neutrinos a year for up to 20 years.
The data collected will be used to make a "neutrino map" of the universe and to learn more about cataclysmic astronomical phenomena, like gamma ray bursts, black holes, and exploding stars, and other aspects of nuclear and particle physics. So far, 3 Nobel prizes in physics have been awarded to scientists studying neutrinos. However, the true potential of IceCube is discovery; the opening of each new astronomical window has led to unexpected discoveries.
The team will be working from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica—the southernmost continually inhabited place on the planet. The IceCube site is about one kilometer from the new South Pole station, which supplies the necessary logistics of food, power, and shelter. The South Pole is reached by plane from McMurdo Station on the coast of Antarctica from October through February when temperatures become too low for planes to safely operate. Approximately 50 people stay through the rest of the year, which is known as wintering over. IceCube has two to three people dedicated to overseeing the operation of the telescope during this period at the South Pole.
Polar Profile
- If you develop an interest in the natural world, it will train you to be a better observer.
