3/1/2023 0 Comments Neutrino detectorThe University of Wisconsin–Madison is the lead institution, coordinating data-taking and M&O activities. The NSF Office of Polar Programs supports the project with a Maintenance and Operations (M&O) grant. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory was built under a National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction grant, with assistance from partner funding agencies around the world. This information is sent to computers in the IceCube Lab on the surface, which converts the messages from individual DOMs into light patterns that reveal the direction and energy of muons and neutrinos. The IceCube sensors collect this light, which is subsequently digitized and time stamped. Neutrinos are not observed directly, but when they happen to interact with the ice they produce electrically charged secondary particles that in turn emit Cherenkov light, as a result of traveling through the ice faster than light travels in ice. IceCube, the only cubic-kilometer neutrino detector constructed to date, was completed in December 2010, only six years after the deployment of the first string at the South Pole. Cosmic rays, which consist mainly of protons, are the highest energy particles ever observed, with energies over a million times those reached by today’s particle accelerators on Earth.ĪMANDA, the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array, was built as a proof of concept in the mid 1990s and demonstrated that the extremely clear Antarctic ice was suitable for detecting energetic neutrinos. The surface array measures the cosmic-ray arrival directions in the Southern Hemisphere as well as the flux and composition of cosmic rays.ĭevelopments in neutrino astronomy have been driven by the search for the sources of cosmic rays, leading at an early stage to the concept of a cubic-kilometer neutrino detector. IceTop, built as a veto and calibration detector for IceCube, also detects air showers from primary cosmic rays in the 300 TeV to 1 EeV energy range. Each station has two tanks, each equipped with two downward facing DOMs. IceTop consists of 81 stations located on top of the same number of IceCube strings. This denser configuration forms the DeepCore subdetector, which lowers the neutrino energy threshold to about 10 GeV, creating the opportunity to study neutrino oscillations. The vertical separation of the DOMs is 17 meters.Įight of these strings at the center of the array were deployed more compactly, with a horizontal separation of about 70 meters and a vertical DOM spacing of 7 meters. The strings are deployed on a hexagonal grid with 125 meters spacing and hold 60 DOMs each. The DOMs are attached to vertical “strings,” frozen into 86 boreholes, and arrayed over a cubic kilometer from 1,450 meters to 2,450 meters depth. The in-ice component of IceCube consists of 5,160 digital optical modules (DOMs), each with a ten-inch photomultiplier tube and associated electronics. Neutrinos, almost massless particles with no electric charge, can travel from their sources to Earth with essentially no attenuation and no deflection by magnetic fields. IceCube is the first gigaton neutrino detector ever built and was primarily designed to observe neutrinos from the most violent astrophysical sources in our universe.
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