Researchers in the IceCube Collaboration are always looking for ways to improve the understanding of the PMTs so they can get the highest-quality data from the DOMs. Most recently, they implemented a new method for more accurately characterizing individual PMT charge distributions, which was shown to improve PMT calibration and simulation. The method is described in a technical report submitted today to the Journal of Instrumentation. […]
Last week the IceCube team completed their planned upgrades for the radio and scintillator arrays. Here we see an antenna that got deployed on the ice. […]
Although summer is coming to an end, it’s not over yet. Planes are still flying to and from the Pole—here we see two twin otters in the air. […]
Our winterovers for the 2018-2019 season, Kathrin Mallot and Benjamin Eberhardt, returned from Antarctica last November. Now that they’ve had a couple of months to relax and readjust to life “up north,” we asked them to reflect upon their recent experience at the South Pole. Read our Q&A to find out what they missed the most, what they learned while they were there, and other things they shared about their adventure. […]
Ah, penguins! Who doesn’t love them? Both of IceCube’s winterovers got to view and photograph penguins recently, but not at the South Pole—no animals can survive the extreme cold temperatures of the Pole. […]
Life at the South Pole is full of traditions. And as one year ends and another begins, anticipation always mounts for a special tradition: the unveiling of the new South Pole marker. […]
The IceCube Collaboration recently performed the first-ever experimental search for solar atmospheric neutrinos. Such a detection would have important implications for understanding solar magnetic fields and how cosmic rays propagate in the inner solar system, and it could even provide additional background to solar dark matter searches. But after investigating seven years of IceCube data, IceCube researchers did not detect any solar atmospheric neutrinos and so set an upper limit on the flux. Their results are outlined in a paper that was recently submitted to the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. […]
The IceCube Collaboration recently conducted a combined IceCube-ANTARES search for neutrino point-like and extended sources in the southern sky. They didn’t find any significant evidence for cosmic neutrino sources, but the analysis shows the strong potential for combining data sets from both experiments. Their results were submitted to The Astrophysical Journal. […]
The last full week of 2019 was a busy one at the South Pole. Yes, there were the holiday festivities (and a group photo!), but plenty of work was going on as well. […]
IceCube isn’t the only neutrino experiment in Antarctica. There is also the ANITA (the ANtarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna) experiment, which flies a balloon over the continent and points radio antennae toward the ground in search of extremely high-energy neutrinos.
The IceCube Collaboration recently followed up on events detected by ANITA and presented their results in a paper submitted today to The Astrophysical Journal. The collaboration found that these neutrinos could not have come from an intense point source. Other explanations for the anomalous signals—possibly involving exotic physics—need to be considered. […]