The Ice Cube experiment

by Prof. Kael Hanson (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Thursday 2 Dec 2010, 16:00 → 17:00 Europe/Brussels

E/3rd floor-E.349 - Seminar room (E.349) (Marc de Hemptinne (chemin du Cyclotron, 2, Louvain-la-Neuve))

The IceCube detector has entered its seventh and final deployment season with just seven strings left to install to complete the expanded 6-string IceCube and DeepCore detector. IceCube is an observatory designed to detect the feeble fluxes of high energy (100 GeV to 10 PeV) neutrinos of extraterrestrial origin. It counts among its science missions the discovery of point sources of neutrino emission, identification of ultrahigh energy diffuse neutrino fluxes, neutrinos from transient phenomena such as gamma ray bursts and supernova explosions, indirect detection of dark matter, and studies of the chemical composition of cosmic rays. It acheives the massive fiducial volume and effective area to required to be sensitive to these fluxes by sparsely instrumenting a cubic kilometer the South Polar ice sheet with an array of 5000 digital photodetector modules which detect the Cherenkov light emitted by muons and electromagnetic cascades produced in neutrino - nucleus interactions in the ice. These events must be separated from the ever-present background of cosmic ray muons and terrestrial atmospheric neutrinos striking the array. Data is collected and filtered at South Pole. The filter preferentially selects interesting events to send daily to the north using a high-bandwidth satellite link. We are currently engaged in the analysis of the IC40 and IC59 data sets which ran from April 2008 - May 2009 and from May 2009 - June 2010, respectively. Results of the IC40 are being released and will be discussed in this talk.