Week 19 at the Pole

Not a particularly busy or hectic week at the Pole—quiet punctuated by work, or work punctuated by quiet, depending on how you look at things. Now, depending on where, not how, you’re looking, you get to see where the action is this time of year at the South Pole. […]

Read More »


Week 18 at the Pole

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. […]

Read More »


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. […]

Read More »


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. […]

Read More »



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. […]

Read More »



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. […]

Read More »