Under a sky lit by auroras, you can see the path through the Dark Sector, bright enough to make out the flag line for quite a ways into the distance. It’s a different story when there are no auroras or bright moon to illuminate things. […]
News
Week 17 at the Pole
It’s aurora season at the South Pole. Two lone figures—both of IceCube’s winterovers—were out on the ice capturing images of the night sky. Although it’s a night sky, that tells us nothing about what time of day it is since it’s winter there and the sun remains down for about six months at a stretch. […]
A first search for sterile neutrinos in IceCube
The IceCube Collaboration has performed two independent searches for light sterile neutrinos, both with one year of data, searching for sterile neutrinos in the energy range between approximately 320 GeV and 20 TeV. IceCube has not found any anomalous disappearance of muon neutrinos and has placed new exclusion limits on the parameter space of the 3+1 model, a scenario with only one sterile neutrino. These results have been submitted today to Physical Review Letters. […]
Week 16 at the Pole
IceCube winterover Mack’s Ecuadorian devil’s mask looks extra devilish under the red lights as he stands for a photo in his cold weather gear after coming in from outside. […]
Improving searches for point sources below 100 TeV
Today, the IceCube Collaboration presents a new technique to lower the energy threshold for neutrino detection while keeping a pointing resolution to within less than a degree. IceCube researchers have used this technique in a joint search with data from a previous analysis using throughgoing muon neutrinos. No point source has been found, but sensitivity for searches below 100 TeV has been improved by a factor of ten. […]
Week 15 at the Pole
IceCube winterover Mack van Rossem stands, with a full moon and the IceCube Lab (ICL) in the background, all geared up and ready to tackle IceTop measurements. Nice mask! […]
Week 14 at the Pole
With the darkness of winter settling in, it’s time to cover the windows. It’s also time for winterizing outdoor equipment and vehicles. Although a large fleet of vehicles is needed for summer activity, most of them are left idle for the winter. […]
Stony Brook and Columbia host IceCube Collaboration meeting this week
The IceCube spring 2016 meeting begins today at Stony Brook University. Assistant Professor Joanna Kiryluk is hosting the weeklong meeting at the Charles B. Wang Center. Pre-meetings were held at Columbia University in New York on April 16-18. […]
Week 13 at the Pole
It was a relatively tranquil week at the Pole, but not without its interruptions—April Fool’s Day pranks among them. The waning light in the sky is beginning to lend a little eeriness to photos. […]
Week 12 at the Pole
A mushroom cloud … at the South Pole? What’s going on down there? What’s going on is actually a rising full moon getting distorted by the atmosphere. Pretty cool image. […]