Monday, December 23, 2013 - 2:15pm
Stefan Westerhoff, University of Wisconsin–Madison physics professor and faculty member at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC), was recently elected as an American Physical Society Fellow for 2013.
Monday, December 23, 2013 - 10:30am
It was a week filled with movement outdoors.
Friday, December 13, 2013 - 4:30pm
The IceCube project has been awarded the 2013 Breakthrough of the Year by the British magazine Physics World. The Antarctic observatory has been selected for making the first observation of cosmic neutrinos, but also for overcoming the many challenges of creating and operating a colossal detector deep under the ice at the South Pole.
Friday, December 13, 2013 - 11:15am
It looks like IceCube winterover Ian Rees is practicing a good luge position, but he’s just taking advantage of his perch to capture photos.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013 - 5:00pm
From the most remote location on Earth, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory peers into deep space. The telescope uses thousands of light sensors built into a cubic kilometer of South Pole ice to reconstruct images of cosmic high-energy neutrinos. IceCube data must be corrected for tiny amounts of contamination, microscopic dust trapped within the ice of the telescope itself. These impurities originated here on Earth, as mineral dust lofted from continental landmasses and ash from ancient volcanic eruptions. First considered a nuisance, the dust in IceCube has become a subject for novel research, telling us vital stories about Earth’s past climate changes.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013 - 11:15am
Large physics experiments are often developed in remote areas: the vast plains of Argentina, a mountainside in Mexico, or deep in the ice at the South Pole in Antarctica. Constructing them is a formidable challenge, and so is collecting and analyzing the data they generate. Physicists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Ohio State University have teamed up to take on a different type of challenge—big data. With funding from the National Science Foundation's BIGDATA initiative, they will explore ways to better analyze, sort, and transmit data from the Askaryan Radio Array at the South Pole in Antarctica and from the Hydrogen Structure Array in Xinjiang, China.
Monday, December 9, 2013 - 1:30pm
The drill in the center of this photo was designed for the Askaryan Radio Array (ARA), a neutrino detector much like the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. But while IceCube monitors the ice for flashes of radiation created in a neutrino interaction, ARA is designed to use radio waves to detect ultra-high-energy neutrinos.
Friday, December 6, 2013 - 2:00pm
Austral summers are not as exciting as they once were for IceCube. There are no more strings to be deployed, and the detector is performing impressively. But still, getting as much data as possible from this huge telescope buried in the Antarctic ice depends on how much can be done at the South Pole during a few months with daylight and reasonable temperatures.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013 - 2:30pm
Results from several new analyses with partial IceCube configurations are being published these days. The IceCube Collaboration is using several independent methods to build a step-by-step probe for the existence of an astrophysical neutrino flux in all detection channels. Each result published so far strengthens the evidence for an astrophysical neutrino flux that was recently presented by the IceCube Collaboration in Science.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013 - 2:15pm
Open coat? No hat? It must be summer at the South Pole. Well, although it’s sunny outside it would probably be a stretch to call it warm, for those of us not used to it anyway.