Can you smell this? It’s the fragrance of gunpowder! Let us then investigate the “smoking gun”! Oh, I love this expression! But why do we relate the expression, “smoking gun”, to astrophysical neutrinos? The answer is simple. We cannot observe particles being accelerated to high energies in situ. To be more precise, we cannot observe protons/nuclei gaining energy of the order of 1015 eV (or even 1020 eV sometimes) in the distant Universe. Then, how can we study these kinds of particles? Indirectly of course! Just let these protons/nuclei gain enough energy so as to be able to interact with their ambient medium and voila! The interactions of accelerated protons/nuclei…
Read More >>IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory
On 18 December 2010, a huge human task was accomplished. 5,160 spherical optical sensors called Digital Optical Modules (DOMs) were transported and placed under the frozen surface of Antarctica. 52 institutions from 12 countries around the globe contributed (and still do) to this collaboration. The DOMs, attached to 86 vertical “strings”, cover a cubic-kilometer area from 1,450 meters to 2,450 meters depth (see Fig. 1) and are designed to indirectly detect neutrinos. Thus the first, and so far the only, cubic-kilometer neutrino telescope was born! This telescope is called the IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory. Neutrinos are electrically neutral subatomic particles that interact very rarely with matter. When they do…
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