The University of Delaware is building “IceTop,” the surface array of detectors on “IceCube”--the world’s largest neutrino telescope, which is now under construction at one of the coldest, driest places on Earth: the South Pole.
Neutrinos are particles that are formed during such cataclysmic cosmic events as exploding stars and colliding galaxies. Scientists want to use these particles as a novel probe into high-energy astrophysical processes, which other telescopes cannot provide.
When completed, the IceCube telescope will consist of more than 70 strings, each containing 60 optical detectors, frozen over a mile-and-a-half deep in the Antarctic ice cap. Each optical detector suspended in the ice is a computer and data acquisition system that has at its heart a photo multiplier tube, a device sensitive enough to detect a single photon of light.
Atop each of the deep ice strings, UD scientists and technicians are installing two 650-gallon tanks of water that each contain two optical detectors. The tanks are filled with water, and the freeze is controlled to produce perfectly clear ice. The purpose of these surface “eyes” is to detect high-energy cosmic rays that interact in the atmosphere above IceCube.
Construction of IceCube and IceTop began in 2001 and will be completed in 2010. University of Delaware researchers are working in collaboration with scientists from the University of Wisconsin, who are coordinating the multi-institutional IceCube project
The project is funded primarily by the National Science Foundation in the United States, with additional contributions from the U.S. Department of Energy, as well as Belgium, Germany, Japan, and Sweden.
Team Members
- Tom Gaisser, Principal Investigator
- David Seckel, Co-Principal Investigator
- Xinhua Bai
- John Clem
- Chris Elliott
- Paul Evenson
- Shahid Hussain
- Hermann Kolanoski
- Takao Kurabara
- James Roth
- Bakhtiyar Ruzybayev
- Len Shulman
- Todor Stanev
- Serap Tilav
- Chen Xu
