The igloo from last week is finally finished. What began as an afternoon project ended up taking an entire week (well, high winds were partly to blame). In the image, you can see the igloo lit from within, and perhaps even discern that there are only few blocks missing to complete the ceiling. […]
That’s not the IceCube Lab all frosted up in this photo but the ARO (Atmospheric Research Observatory) building, with its LIDAR beams shown shooting straight up into the sky. […]
In an effort to fill in the blanks of the Standard Model of particle physics, science has been conducting a diligent search for a hypothesized particle known as the “sterile neutrino.” Now, with the latest results from an icy particle detector at the South Pole, scientists are almost certain that there is no such particle. […]
Station life was quiet at the South Pole last week, but not too quiet. They celebrated Christmas in July with a special dinner. Popular in many parts of the world, for various reasons, Christmas in July is only one of numerous celebrations held throughout the year at the Pole. […]
In summer at the South Pole, the traditional place for photo ops is the ceremonial Pole, where a mirrored sphere is mounted on a post and surrounded by a semicircular lineup of flags. But in the dark of winter, any place is as good as another as long as you have a nice aurora as backdrop […]
The IceCube Collaboration is now accumulating more statistics in the search for the sources of very high energy neutrinos, but also to learn more about their nature. In a new study, submitted this week to the Astrophysical Journal, the collaboration reports a substantially improved observation of the diffuse muon neutrino flux in the Northern Hemisphere using six years of IceCube data with about a tenfold increase in statistics. Once more, a clear astrophysical contribution has been found, which at the highest energies excludes a purely atmospheric origin at the 5.6 sigma level. Also, the accuracy of the measurement of the spectral properties has been improved.
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The sky was not disappointing anyone last week at the Pole; it had it all—stars, Milky Way, and auroras. Work-wise it was rather quiet for IceCube’s winterovers. But they had other activities going on, including emergency response training and showcasing their LEGO creations in a blog post for LEGO fans. […]
The IceCube Collaboration has made public today that a new search for cosmogenic neutrinos resulted in two very high energy neutrinos. These neutrinos, which are found to be of astrophysical origin with a 92.3% probability, include the highest energy neutrino detected to date. While of astrophysical origin, the energy of these neutrinos does not match the expectation for a cosmogenic neutrino flux. The lack of evidence for such events in a search of seven years of IceCube data places very strong constraints on the sources of UHECR. Proton-dominated sources are greatly disfavored, and testing mixed and heavy nuclei cosmic-ray sources will require much bigger instruments, such as an extension of IceCube or radio Askaryan neutrino detectors. These results have been submitted yesterday to Physical Review Letters. […]
The IceCube Collaboration presents results from a search for sources of high-energy neutrons using four years of data from IceTop, the surface detector array. Researchers have not found any evidence for astrophysical neutrons, but the results have allowed the collaboration to set new limits that constrain the possible galactic neutron sources. These results have just been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal. […]
The Precision IceCube Next Generation Upgrade (PINGU) is the proposed infill extension in a region at the center of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory that will lower the energy threshold to a few GeV, dramatically increasing both the number of GeV-scale neutrinos detected by IceCube and, more importantly, the precision with which they are measured. […]