Mechanism is via conversion of neutrinos into charged particles which are then detected via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium. (That is only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded.)
If anyone was wondering how some of that heavy stuff gets to the south pole to build such a large engineering project, at the farthest possible end of any logistics chain:
The best science comes from areas that have no obvious use. The original insights into nuclear physics, quantum physics and relativity were all pure thought experiments. They led to the world we live in.
I'm personally very happy that we're still funding science that isn't obviously monetised.
The reason for Antarctica is that it's the only place you find cubic kilometres of stable ice that doesn't drift around.
1: Ice-mass that isn't contaminated by atomic testing fallout (if the ice has been there since the 40s it's without radioactive waste (faschinating to read about how WW2 wrecks is a prime resource of steel since it's a huge amount of steel without trace amounts of radionucletiods from testing fallout).
2: No current interference (nuclear power, radiowaves,etc) creating possible test uncertainties.
3: I'm sure there are other reasons
The negative naturally is cost, but since the expriment succeeded it will probably be useful for any attempts to send robots or even humanity into space beyond the solar system.
I appreciate the boldness of this project, it has an element of sci-fi to it. Building a base at the south pole to bury sensors in ice to measure elusive particles. The stuff of dreams!
To be fair, the base was already there and logistically essential. The IceCube topside building is just a part of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, about a km or so from the Elevated Station.
Pretty cool. One of the big challenges in trying neutrino detection in ice is dealing with funding agencies. The optical properties of ice only get good when you are actually a few kilometers deep in very old ice. That is you can't just build a demonstrator in the nearest glacier with a few leftover photomultipliers, you need to go directly to Antarctica and bore a three kilometer hole into the ice. And projects where the MVP is quite expensive are always very hard to get funded.
I remember one of my professor, a pioneer of neutrino detectors in Europe, mentioning Ice Cube in a lecture more than 20 years ago. Long time scale (due to funding).
We think of receiving a Nobel Prize as something super rare and exceptional and it is. What still always astounds me though, is this:
There are nearly 300 living laureates. Enough to hold a yearly meetup for them in Lindau, where usually about 40 gather. This year, for the event's 75th anniversary, there were even about 70. Imagine that.
IIRC Oppenheimer facilitated / sponsored a meeting there after the Manhattan Project, as a gathering where physicists could talk freely about physics for a change.
I wonder - was there really no other people they could have given it to? The detection of gravitational waves was split between a theorist, experimentalist and a person who had a big hand in shepherding the project along. Could not the same have been done here?
Neutrino physics is the frontier. It’s one area where we know there are “physics beyond the standard model” though IceCube hasn’t quite been able to answer the neutrino mass question.
That's an uncharitable take. The proposed observatory was through pristine dense forest, and one of the most important elephant corridors in Asia. It was opposed by the democratically elected government, and litigated in courts in an open and transparent way. The physics gains do not outweigh the environmental cost, and the fact that scientists were able to get valuable data from an observatory in the lifeless Antarctic is further justification not to build this.
IceCube observatory is for studying the high energy cosmic neutrinos from a distant galaxy or black holes. But the one proposed INO is to study the low and medium energy atmospheric neutrinos. INO was designed to study the mass ordering of neutrinos. Both observatories are for studying different aspects and properties of neutrinos and are not the same.
Sometimes I think it would be nice if there were biographies that laid out when and how Nobel laureates made their discoveries. Then wouldn't it be possible to pattern how people discover certain phenomena?
Not Nobel laureates, but people have tried this. I once was looking for the early education of famous scientists and found the book Cradles of Eminence [1], which compares the childhoods of several hundred famous people.
One thing I noticed was that more than a few were seriously sick in childhood and had to be homeschooled. This includes Edward Morley, Peter Higgs, René Descartes (though I'm not sure how rare it was at his time), and the mathematician Julia Robinson, who was bedridden with scarlet fever at 9 years old, then had to get tutoring to catch back up, and had this to say about it [2]:
> I have since read that a solitary childhood or, what amounts to the same thing, a period of isolation resulting from an illness is frequently noted in the early lives of scientists. I am not sure what the significance of this finding is. Obviously I had to amuse myself for long periods of time, but I didn’t do so with mathematics. I am inclined to think that what I learned during that year in bed was patience.
> By the time I was well enough to go back to school, I had missed more than two years. My parents arranged to have me tutored by a retired elementary school teacher. In one year, working three mornings a week, she and I went through the state syllabuses for the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. It makes me wonder how much time must be wasted in classrooms.
Sidenote: I found the book [1] through asking a free LLM what source this quote might be referring to. They are reasonably good at this kind of literature search, especially because it's easy to judge whether they gave you something useful.
The common denominator is money and time. The only way to get more results is to put more funding out there (and accepting that not everything is about a direct ROI).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
Mechanism is via conversion of neutrinos into charged particles which are then detected via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium. (That is only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded.)
This was also discussed recently if you are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49655286
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=south+pol...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole_Traverse
https://octanepress.com/content/south-pole-traverse_antartic...
Significant amounts of things still come in by air cargo at great cost, but a lot also comes the long slow way.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1137280085
Thanks, I had no idea this was possible!
https://xkcd.com/1053/
I'm personally very happy that we're still funding science that isn't obviously monetised.
The reason for Antarctica is that it's the only place you find cubic kilometres of stable ice that doesn't drift around.
1: Ice-mass that isn't contaminated by atomic testing fallout (if the ice has been there since the 40s it's without radioactive waste (faschinating to read about how WW2 wrecks is a prime resource of steel since it's a huge amount of steel without trace amounts of radionucletiods from testing fallout).
2: No current interference (nuclear power, radiowaves,etc) creating possible test uncertainties.
3: I'm sure there are other reasons
The negative naturally is cost, but since the expriment succeeded it will probably be useful for any attempts to send robots or even humanity into space beyond the solar system.
I appreciate the boldness of this project, it has an element of sci-fi to it. Building a base at the south pole to bury sensors in ice to measure elusive particles. The stuff of dreams!
https://www.infographics.se/
https://www.behance.net/JohanJarnestad
https://archive.org/details/quarksleptonsint0000halz
There are nearly 300 living laureates. Enough to hold a yearly meetup for them in Lindau, where usually about 40 gather. This year, for the event's 75th anniversary, there were even about 70. Imagine that.
IIRC Oppenheimer facilitated / sponsored a meeting there after the Manhattan Project, as a gathering where physicists could talk freely about physics for a change.
https://science.nasa.gov/image-article/apod-2011-february-13...
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/why-the-neu...
One thing I noticed was that more than a few were seriously sick in childhood and had to be homeschooled. This includes Edward Morley, Peter Higgs, René Descartes (though I'm not sure how rare it was at his time), and the mathematician Julia Robinson, who was bedridden with scarlet fever at 9 years old, then had to get tutoring to catch back up, and had this to say about it [2]:
> I have since read that a solitary childhood or, what amounts to the same thing, a period of isolation resulting from an illness is frequently noted in the early lives of scientists. I am not sure what the significance of this finding is. Obviously I had to amuse myself for long periods of time, but I didn’t do so with mathematics. I am inclined to think that what I learned during that year in bed was patience.
> By the time I was well enough to go back to school, I had missed more than two years. My parents arranged to have me tutored by a retired elementary school teacher. In one year, working three mornings a week, she and I went through the state syllabuses for the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. It makes me wonder how much time must be wasted in classrooms.
Sidenote: I found the book [1] through asking a free LLM what source this quote might be referring to. They are reasonably good at this kind of literature search, especially because it's easy to judge whether they gave you something useful.
[1] https://archive.org/details/cradlesofeminenc0000goer_l9f8/pa...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20181207045746/https://www.maa.o...