IceCube Neutrino Telescope

AMANDA writes: "Ice Cube is a neutrino telescope located at the south pole. It has just received the congressional support for $15 million dollars from the NSF. It will be the largest scientific instrument in the world. It promises a view into the most energetic phenomena in the universe." The idea is to use a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice as a detector. Impressive.

Comments

It isn't "extraordinarily transparent" to me...

[tonyc.com]

They say there are going to be about 5000 detectors spaced throughout the cube; that's a spacing of about 55-60 meters between them. Is the "extraordinarily transparent Antarctic ice" so clear that the detectors can pick up Cherenkov light through that much of it, or is that distance sufficient to visually isolate each detector completely from its neighbors? I guess my question is, how much of the cube is really being used in the detector, and how much is just optical insulation?

Ice is cool but...

[rakerman]

So is SNO

Re:Ice is cool but...

[FTL]

> So is SNO

Moderators, that was most certainly *not* offtopic.

I would be very much interested in a comparison between the Ice Cube and SNO. My guess is that the Ice Cube is a lot cheaper, but that the SNO is a lot more accurate.

ANTARES - Neutrino detection in the Mediterranean

[ericwb]

Just to stay in the subject, and for those who might be interested, check out this detector.

It's sort of like the water version of the ice-cube detector.

Much nicer site for a vacation, too. 8^)

The home page is here.

Re:Seismic stability?

[darkonc]

They move at a rate of 1 to 2 meters per day, sliding over a bed of sediment saturated with liquid water. But if the bed becomes cold enough for the water in it to start freezing, the loss of lubrication causes the ice stream to slow and eventually stop moving, Tulaczyk said.

That 1Metre/day is the movement of the whole ice chunk over lubricated ground. That sort of movement is not likely to affect the detector that much... More important is the warping of the ice block against itself which is more likely to be in the range of inches or feet /year (as an analogy: I may be walking at 5MPH, but my backbone is relatively stable relative to itself [unless I get hit by a car going 60MPH, in which case, all bets are off])

As noted at one Nasa glacial site,

Ice streams-large river-like currents of ice flowing through the ice sheets at speeds one to two orders of magnitude faster than the general ice flow-greatly increase the potential swiftness of ice-sheet collapse by rapidly transporting ice from the interior of the ice sheet to the margin.

Glacial movements on the Antarctic shelf can vary in the range of orders of magnitude. In other words, the movement at the place chosen for the dector are probably unlikely to be moving at the 1M/day rate.. Given that the detector is apparently at the south pole, my expectation is that that section of ice sheet is going to be relatively stable.