Illustration of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (A large-scale observational array) The average temperature in Antarctica in March can be as low as -45℃. Scott, both of whom led teams that competed against each other to be the first to reach the South Pole.Īntarctic winters last from March to September, with summers being from around November to February. The station was named after Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and British explorer Robert F. It is located in the center of the continent near the South Pole. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is constructed at the US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica.
The South Pole & Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station The observatory was partially running by 2005, and full-scale observations began after its completion in 2011. IceCube’s predecessor AMANDA (the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array) launched in 1996, and construction on the IceCube observatory began in 2004. IceCube was developed by an international team led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the enormous observatory was built at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, a US research station in Antarctica. There are no such problems in the hard ice of the South Pole, and the highly-transparent ice sheet is said to offer ideal observing environment. Experiments have been conducted in oceans and lakes, but wind and waves tend to cause issues. It was there that University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Francis Halzen came up with the idea of using the extensive ice sheets at the South Pole. However, the aim of IceCube was to be able to detect events within an even greater volume, so to build a large-enough artificial water tank would require an immense piece of land and an enormous amount of money. One option is to build a water tank like that installed at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory, where University of Tokyo professors and Nobel Prize winners Masatoshi Koshiba and Takaaki Kajita conducted their experiments. In order to increase the frequency at which we can detect neutrino induced events, we need to build a detection facility that encompasses a vast amount of some sort of material - the more matter we can look at the same time, the more neutrino events we can observe.
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To learn more about how to capture a neutrino, click here.Īrtist rendering of Cherenkov radiation being emitted within the ice sheet IceCube detects the presence of neutrinos by detecting that Cherenkov radiation. However, on the rare occasion they do collide with an atomic nucleus or electron, charged particles are generated and they emit a form of light called Cherenkov radiation. The neutrinos the IceCube is looking for are highly transparent elementary particles, and they are extremely difficult to detect because they rarely interact with other matter. ©IceCube Collaboration How IceCube Observes Neutrinos Researchers from many different backgrounds are working together on the project. Research institutions collaborating in IceCube (upper rank), and home countries of researchers involved. We have been involved in the project since the IceCube collaboration was launched in 2002, and played an important role in researching the most famous neutrino events and in identifying neutrino sources. Our team from Chiba University is the only Japanese institution participating in the project. IceCube is an international collaboration that observes high-energy cosmic neutrinos using 5,160 spherical optical detectors with diameters of 33 cm, buried between 1,500 and 2,500 meters under the ice sheet at the South Pole. ICEHAP’s Neutrino Astronomy Division is a member of the IceCube collaboration conducting neutrino observations. IceCube - Catching Neutrinos at the South Pole
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