http://icecube.wisc.edu/news/view/564

With better and larger neutrino telescopes in the horizon, researchers are now designing more efficient analysis techniques that will boost our understanding of neutrinos and advance searches for new physics including additional neutrino flavors or new interactions. These techniques not only provide more accurate and robust results, but also reduce expenses and time in computation that could limit improvements in the design of new detectors or the discovery potential of existing facilities.

Nature provides huge numbers of neutrinos and, thanks to its denser infill array DeepCore, IceCube can now perform very precise measurements of the neutrinos interacting near or in the detector. Future extensions of IceCube, known as IceCube-Gen2, as well as other neutrino telescopes in water will push these measurements to the next level of accuracy.

IceCube researchers present in the paper now on arXiv reduce the amount of simulation computation by dividing the production into four phases or stages: i) theoretical predictions of nonoscillated neutrinos; ii) adding oscillation effects, which change the flavor content of the sample; iii) integrating the effects of the detector, i.e., taking into account the probability that a given neutrino interacts in or near the detector and is later selected as an interesting event for a specific analysis; and iv) reconstruction, i.e., the transformation of raw data into the physical properties of the events.

The trick is in calculating and applying the physics and detector effects not on each individual event, but on groups of events that have similar enough properties.

The following image explains “deep core”. Pushing the measurement region all the way down to bedrock.

Oh, this isn’t about the rapper?

Divine Angel said:

Oh, this isn’t about the rapper?

Nor the rapper Ice-T. Now an actor. Now 60 years old…

Bubblecar said:

Hey that’s nice. I’ve never seen that.

I’ve heard that IceCube began when some scientists smuggled some scintillators into Antarctica and installed them. They got into serious trouble with the NSF because it had not approved the project. But after they had shown that the concept worked, plans for a full scale neutrino detector were drawn up and approved, a few cores first in AMANDA which was later expanded to become IceCube.

A bit more web searching. Hello, this is new, “The proposed acoustic detection of neutrinos via the thermoacoustic effect is the subject of dedicated studies done by the ANTARES, IceCube, and KM3NeT collaborations.”

“The acoustic neutrino detection technique is a promising approach for future large-scale detectors with the aim of measuring the small expected flux of cosmogenic neutrinos at energies exceeding 100 PeV. The technique is based on the thermo-acoustic model, which implies that the energy deposition by a particle cascade—resulting from a neutrino interaction in a medium with suitable thermal and acoustic properties—leads to a local heating and a subsequent characteristic pressure pulse that propagates in the surrounding medium. The main advantage of using sound for the detection of neutrino interactions, as opposed to Cherenkov light, lies in the much longer attenuation length of the former type of radiation: several kilometres for sound compared to several ten metres for light in the respective frequency ranges of interest in sea water”

A proposed new detector is TAUWER.

“TAUWER picks up where the present IceCube design leaves off. Tau neutrinos with energies greater than 10^16 eV—over a billion times more energetic than those produced by supernovas. Neutrinos with higher energies may not be able to make it from one end of the planet to the other since they’ll very likely be derailed by the rock in the earth. But if the trip through the earth is short enough, they can still make their way out. TAUWER detectors would turn their attention particles that fly through short slices of the planet, about 1/13 the diameter of the earth.”