A great take on traveling to the Pole and how IceCube is providing the infrastructure for a dark matter detector […]
South Pole Weekly Report, Dec. 19, 2010
Last week marked the successful completion of all major IceCube construction. The final hole of the IceCube array, was completed in the morning hours of December 18, and the final IceCube string was tied off on Saturday, December 18, around 1800h New Zealand time. […]
UW-Madison to unlock space secrets in Antarctica with IceCube
Completion and Inauguration
The construction of the world’s largest neutrino observatory was completed at the South Pole on December 18, 2010. This was a huge milestone for IceCube as well as the scientific community. See photos from the final deployment to the celebration and inauguration. […]
IceCube-22 Solar WIMP Data
Searching for Muon Neutrinos from Dark Matter Annihilations in the Sun Relic dark matter in the galactic halo may become gravitationally trapped in the Sun and accumulate in its center, where it can annihilate each other, producing standard model particles, which may decay creating neutrinos. Neutrinos can escape the Sun and reach Earth. Icecube indirectly […]
AMANDA 7 Year Data
Introduction The Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) is an optical Cherenkov detector consisting of 677 optical modules arranged in 19 strings frozen ~1.5 km — ~2 km deep in the ice sheet at the geographic South Pole. Each optical module contains a 20 cm photomultiplier tube surrounded by a glass pressure sphere housing. […]
1998 – Super-Kamiokande collaboration announces evidence of non-zero neutrino mass
Construction of Kamioka Underground Observatory, the predecessor of the present Kamioka Observatory, Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo began in 1982 and was completed in April, 1983. The purpose of the observatory was to detect proton decay, one of the most fundamental questions of elementary particle physics. The detector, named KamiokaNDE for Kamioka […]
1996 – AMANDA neutrino telescope observes neutrinos at the South Pole
The Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) was a neutrino telescope located beneath the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. It consists of optical modules, each containing one photomultipler tube, sunk in Antarctic ice cap at a depth of about 1500 to 1900 meters. In its latest development stage, known as AMANDA-II, AMANDA is made up […]
1995 – Missing solar neutrinos confirmed by GALLEX
Until the year 1990 there was no observation of the initial reaction in the nuclear fusion chain. This changed with the installation of the Gallium Experiments. Gallium as target allows neutrino interaction via νe + 71Ga → 71Ge + e–. The threshold of this reaction is 233 keV (see the spectrum) , low enough also […]
1994 – First proclamation of possible neutrinos oscillations seen by LSND experiment
The Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) experiment involved the amassed data collected between the years of 1993-1998 designed to measure the number of neutrinos being produced by an accelerator neutrino source. It consisted of a tank filled with 167 tons (50,000 gallons) of mineral oil, 14 pounds of b-PDB (butyl-phenyl-bipheny-oxydiazole) organic scintillator material, and an […]