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Upgrade Update #3
Vivian O’Dell, IceCube/NSF As the season progresses, the IceCube Upgrade team continues to grow. Eight more arrivals last week brought the South Pole IceCube population up to 29. As newcomers acclimated, the “old-timers” kept up with the snow grooming around drill camp—things are looking good there. They continue to shovel out other structures and have…
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Upgrade Update #2
Kurt Studt, IceCube/NSF After the first group of IceCubers spent a couple of days acclimating and reviewing the work needed to get the drill camp up and running, the crew went straight to work. The first order of business? Shoveling. And lots of it. They managed to shovel out most of the buildings in the…
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Upgrade Update #1
Vivian O’Dell, IceCube/NSF The first week of the final field season for the IceCube Upgrade started out with delays. Figures. Of course, even though that’s not what you hope for, uncooperative weather at the South Pole is a fact of life, something to deal with in stride. The first group of IceCubers for the Upgrade…
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Quantifying the estimated sensitivity of the IceCube Upgrade to atmospheric neutrino oscillations
As cosmic rays collide with particles in the Earth’s atmosphere, air showers containing atmospheric muons and neutrinos are produced. The atmospheric neutrinos are then detected by DeepCore, a denser and smaller array of sensors in the center of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. Compared to the main IceCube detector, DeepCore is sensitive…
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IceCube-Gen2 selected for German research infrastructure prioritization short list
The IceCube Lab. Credit: Ilya Bodo, IceCube/NSF IceCube-Gen2, the planned extension of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, was among nine projects selected for the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space’s (BMFTR) short list of the most important and promising research infrastructure projects. Federal Research Minister Dorothee Bär made the announcement earlier…
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IceCube at ICRC 2025
Participants at ICRC 2025. Courtesy of ICRC The 39th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC), the largest conference in the world for cosmic ray physics, was held on July 14-July 24 at the Geneva International Conference Center in Geneva, Switzerland. The main topics covered included cosmic-ray physics, gamma-ray astronomy, neutrino astronomy and neutrino physics, dark matter…
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Another successful field season for IceCube Upgrade at the South Pole
The IceCube field team gathered at the ceremonial South Pole on New Year’s Eve. Credit: Ilya Bodo, IceCube/NSF Since November of last year, a team of IceCube engineers and scientists have been hard at work during the second of three consecutive field seasons for the IceCube Upgrade. Over the course of the season, 37 team…
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Successful testing of over 10,000 photomultiplier tubes for IceCube Upgrade digital optical modules
At the South Pole, the cubic-kilometer-sized IceCube Neutrino Observatory searches for high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin. When a neutrino crashes into the ice, blue light is emitted and detected by some of IceCube’s 5,160 digital optical modules (DOMs) across 86 vertical cables (strings) embedded deep within the Antarctic ice. The IceCube Upgrade, an enhancement to…
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First field season for IceCube Upgrade ongoing at the South Pole
Over the past two months, a team of IceCube drill engineers have completed an impressive amount of work during the first of three consecutive field seasons for the IceCube Upgrade. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and international collaborators. The goal of the project is to drill seven holes in 2025/2026 and…
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Thai engineer joins the IceCube Upgrade project
Chana Sinsabvarodom speaks at a press conference in Bangkok on November 24, 2023. Credit: Dr. Tatphicha Promfu Thai engineer Chana Sinsabvarodom was recently selected to work on the IceCube Upgrade project, which will install seven more densely instrumented strings of light sensors near the center of the IceCube array at the South Pole. The IceCube…
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Federal physics advisory panel recommends funding next-generation IceCube observatory, other major experiments
A group of scientists tasked with advising the federal government’s investments in particle physics research is recommending that the United States fund a planned expansion (dubbed IceCube-Gen2) of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an international scientific collaboration operated by the University of Wisconsin–Madison at the South Pole. The recommendation from the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel,…
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IceCube at ICRC 2023
Last week marked the end of the 38th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC), the largest conference in the world for cosmic ray physics. The weeklong conference was held July 26-August 3 at Nagoya University in Nagoya, Japan. ICRC 2023 was the largest ICRC in history, with a record number of 1,406 participants…
