Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory At South Pole

Scryer writes "Construction of the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory was completed on 18 Dec at the South Pole. It's now the world's largest neutrino detector, with 5,160 optical sensors on 86 strings embedded two kilometers below the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. It has been gathering data since construction started, and will be fully operational after the last strings freeze in March 2011."

Comments

TRIPLE THREAT!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

First he was just an MC/Rapper...

Then and Actor,

Now? He's a scientific observatory!

Re:TRIPLE THREAT!

[PatPending]

Ice Cube will also serve double duty by studying Black Hos

Re:TRIPLE THREAT!

[bluefoxlucid]

Schwarzenegger had some real human life behind his acting. He played the part but he played as himself. He played the part of a lifeless robot pretty good. He played his part in Last Action Hero as a no-bullshit cop pretty good. He never portrayed his character over-dramatized, fluffed, and out of sync with the reality he was in; the character was fluid and fitting.

Re:TRIPLE THREAT!

[Dachannien]

I'm just waiting for Xzibit to Pimp My Particle Accelerator.

And they're hiring.

[blair1q]

Want to spend a winter in Antarctica as the BOFH for a scientific supercomputer watching for neutrinos in a 2-km^3 ice cube?

Recruitment for the 2011-2012 season will begin in early 2011

Re:And they're hiring.

[oldspewey]

Oh come on - it's one night. You can handle a single night's work can't you?

Wrong Link

[icebike]

The actual story is here
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-icecube-world-largest-neutrino-observatory.html

The key bits is this (should have been in the summary):

Under construction since 2004, IceCube encloses a cubic kilometer of clear ice, beginning one and a half kilometers beneath the surface and extending downward another kilometer. The telescope has to be this big because neutrino collisions with matter are exceedingly rare: out of uncounted trillions of neutrinos constantly passing through the ice, IceCube will observe just a few hundred a day.

Seeing them at all is only possible because when neutrinos collide with the nuclei of oxygen atoms in the ice, they turn into energetic charged particles called muons, moving in the same direction. Because these muons (and other debris from the collision) are moving faster than light can travel through ice, they radiate a shock wave of blue Cherenkov radiation visible to IceCube’s photodetectors.

Re:Wrong Link

[Chris Burke]

I think one of the neatest things about Ice Cube is that it is essentially using the entire freaking planet earth as a filter for muon sources other than neutrino interactions. It can detect what direction a source of Cherenkov radiation came from, and if it came from the direction of the sky then it's vastly more likely to have been caused by some other form of cosmic ray and neutrino interactions would be completely lost in the noise. Neutrinos can pass through the whole planet with ease, though, so by subtracting out the sky-originating muons, they are left with the probable neutrinos.

In fact I remember a Slashdot article from a while back where they took the data that they usually subtract out as non-neutrino noise and analyzed it, and were able to make some interesting discoveries about cosmic rays. Oh hey, found the article: http://www.physorg.com/news199468476.html

Unfortunate choice of a name

[mangu]

There was a time when project names were chosen to be cute acronyms. I work with digital signal processing where there are algorithms named MUSIC, for "MUltiple SIgnal Classification", and ESPRIT, for "Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Techniques".

Today it's better to have Google-friendly names, i.e. names that are unique. Every time when I start a new project name now I first google the name, if it gets any results I change the name. This is priceless for little-known projects, because any extra words you have to add to a search limit the results you get.

In the two examples I cited above, adding the word "algorithm" will return what you want, but how many pages are there in the web that mention MUSIC and ESPRIT without the word "algorithm"? Those pages are lost in the Google noise.

Obligatory Ice Cube parody

[bojangler]

F*** the Pole-Ice comin' straight from the underground

Fully Operational

[richard tarantula]

Oh, I'm afraid the Observatory will be quite operational when your neutrino friends arrive