A steady wind shows the flags at the ceremonial South Pole aligning themselves quite neatly. Flying conditions were good for most of the week, with several incoming flights bringing more summer visitors to the Pole, including the first IceCube team members to join the winterovers this season. […]
Clear weather allowed most of the scheduled flights to make it to the Pole last week, with a stream of new arrivals from each plane. Inside the galley, the new summer crowd and the few remaining winterover staff do a good job of filling up the space. […]
New results submitted today to the Astrophysical Journal are the outcome of a combined search for neutrino point sources performed by the ANTARES and IceCube collaborations. No source has been identified, but the combined search improves the sensitivity to point sources by up to a factor of two, which delivers more stringent upper limits on the flux for the candidate sources considered in this analysis. […]
It’s that time of year for the “changing of the guard”—for IceCube’s winterovers, that is. Last week, Christian Krueger, one of IceCube’s 2015-16 winterovers, arrived alone and can be seen walking back from the plane alongside Stephan Richter, current winterover, who was on hand to greet him. […]
The IceCube Collaboration today presents a search for relativistic and mildly relativistic monopoles using two years of data. No monopole candidate was observed, but IceCube data allowed setting very stringent limits for the range of velocities studied. These results have been submitted today to European Physical Journal C. […]
IceCube winterover Stephan Richter took this wide angle shot of the South Pole station’s galley—in a completely empty state, not likely to found this way much longer since summer personnel will be arriving soon. The galley will be a bit busier with the expanded station population. […]
Neutrino physicists spend a lot of time in the dark. As a figurative statement this reflects how difficult neutrinos are to understand, but it also reveals the literal sense that we work with experiments that do not see a lot of sun—and it’s not just the South Pole, it’s also in mines, tunnels, and deep underwater in seas and lakes. But just like a rare neutrino interaction, every so often a brief flash of light offers some new truth about the nature of our universe. […]
The first planes of the season have arrived at the South Pole. Two planes landed last week, first a Basler (bearing gifts) and later a Twin Otter, shown in this image. […]
Introduction The spectrum of cosmic rays includes the most energetic particles ever observed. The mechanism of their acceleration and their sources are, however, still mostly unknown. Observing astrophysical neutrinos can help solve this problem. Because neutrinos are produced in hadronic interactions and are neither absorbed nor deflected, they will point directly back to their source. […]
The winterover crew gathered at the geographic South Pole for their annual group shot.
It was a relatively quiet week for the IceCube detector, but busy in general for the station. It’s that time of year, post sunrise, when preparations for summer arrivals are in full swing. […]