We’re still very much at the beginning of our neutrino journey what we do with this technology and information remains for the physicists of the future. It could also potentially be used to assess Earth’s crust for mineral deposits or provide a new kind of communication. Perhaps the closest to reality is using neutrino detectors to monitor nuclear proliferation for national security. Because neutrinos are so small, wily, and hard to detect, there are many practical hurdles between the current state and implementation. People are already dreaming up interesting applications for neutrinos and neutrino research. We’re not sure where the technology-the sensitive detectors, powerful particle accelerators, data processors, and other things that make experiments run-will eventually be useful. This also applies for much of the technology that is u sed to build and run physics experiments-no one could have predicted the way the World Wide Web, developed to share physics data, would revolutionize how we communicate, shop, travel, and do a thousand other things. Think of the electron: Early researchers could have no idea that discovering the electron would revolutionize the world, providing us with electronics, computing, and a more connected world. As with much of basic research, we often don’t know where the research will ultimately lead us. They can also help us better understand larger fundamental physics questions and test our theories about how things work. This tells us more about the particles themselves and how they fit into our picture of the universe. Average summer temperatures at the south pole is -18☏.Neutrinos are poorly understood, so the current priority is basic research.The weight of the hose used for the drill is 25,000 lbs!.The average time to deploy a string is 11 hours.The amount of ice melted per hole is approximately 200,000 gallons. Further measurement of the neutrino’s mass will continue through 2024.The average amount of fuel use to drill each hole is approximately 4800 gallons.The average depth of an IceCube hole is 2452 m.The time it took to drill IceCube's first hole was 57 hours!.The average time to drill a hole for IceCube is approximately 48 hours.The travel time from Los Angeles to the South Pole is approximately 48 hours.Each of the IceCube strings have a theme and each DOM has its own name!.The Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been a major contributor as well.įrom the University of Wisconsin, we get these fun facts about the IceCube project: It was funded largely by the National Science Foundation and is now led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The IceCube collaboration team includes some 40 affiliated institutions in the US, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Barbados, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. "If we're lucky, we may also find clues about the nature of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up about five times as much of the universe as all the stars, planets, and other normal matter combined." "We hope that the neutrinos detected by IceCube will provide the smoking gun that tells us where the cosmic rays are produced, and maybe they also will give us clues about the processes that accelerate them to such high energies," said Tyce DeYoung, an IceCube scientist and an assistant professor of physics at Penn State, one of the IceCube collaborators in a statement. "In a lab on the surface of the ice, signals from DOMs on many different strings are combined into a single data stream, which is analyzed to determine the direction and energy of the neutrino events that left their tracks," according to the Berkeley Lab Web site. Key to the $271 million IceCube telescope are its 5,160 basketball-sized detectors known as Digital Optical Modules (DOMs) and their photomultiplier tubes which ultimately will provide the data that lets scientists track neutrino events. Lower-energy neutrinos are known to come from the Sun, and others at higher energies come from cosmic rays interacting with the Earth's atmosphere and dramatic astronomical sources such as exploding supernovae in the Milky Way and other distant galaxies, the scientists stated. Such ultra-high-energy neutrinos may be produced in such cataclysmic astrophysical events as violent explosions of gamma-ray bursts and in the energetic particle jets powered by massive black holes. And so just accidentally, they run straight into the nucleus of an atom and then create lots of other particles, which we can see and it's only these accidental crashes of neutrinos that allow us to observe them. The only difference is that light doesn't go through a wall whereas neutrinos go through everything. University of Wisconsin physics professor Francis Halzen said of neutrinos: "They are just like light there is basically no difference between neutrinos and light.
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