IceCube: Neutrino Observatory

IceCube is a particle detector at the South Pole that records the interactions of a nearly massless sub-atomic particle called the neutrino. IceCube searches for neutrinos from the most violent astrophysical sources: events like exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars. The IceCube telescope is a powerful tool to search for dark matter, and could reveal the new physical processes associated with the enigmatic origin of the highest energy particles in nature.

The main goal of the IceCube experiment is to identify and investigate the inner engines of the cosmic accelerators that are responsible for the most energetic cosmic rays observed at Earth. The detector is located close to the geographic South Pole and comprises a surface detector (IceTop) with an area of 1 square kilometer for cosmic ray studies and about 5200 sensors buried in the deep glacial ice at depths between 1450m and 2450m, comprising 1 cubic kilometer of instrumented ice to detect high-energy
neutrinos. The full detector was completed in december 2010 and has been taking data ever since. After the discovery of high-energy cosmic neutrinos in 2013 it became clear that an extension of the observatory is needed to obtain sufficient statistics at higher energies in order to investigate the details of the observed cosmic neutrino spectrum.