Construction of the world’s largest particle detector is now complete after 10 years of drilling deeper than a mile into ultraclear Antarctic ice.
Called the IceCube, the three-dimensional array of sensors can detect neutrinos expelled by some of the universe’s most violent sources, including black holes, supernovas and energetic stars.
Neutrinos weigh hardly anything, so the particles usually travel through matter — including the sun and Earth — without interacting. But every now and then they slam into the cores of atoms to create nuclear particle showers. The events emit faint blue trails of light which IceCube’s 5,160 sensors can track with extreme precision.
“About one in a million neutrinos crash into a proton [in IceCube]. We’re measuring the energy and the directions of those nuclear reactions to build a neutrino-based map of the sky,” said Francis Halzen, a theoretical physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and leader of IceCube.
The $100-million neutrino-detection effort is one of the most challenging ever attempted by engineers and physicists, Halzen said.
“Nobody would have bet on the success of this project, and rightfully so,” Halzen said. “If we knew how complex it would be to build, we may have never started.”
In this awsome gallery on Wired.com, you can take a tour of the world’s biggest, iciest particle detector.
Video: Animations show the drilling of IceCube’s 1.5-mile-deep holes, the completed array of light-detecting sensors and a simulation of a neutrino collision event.
Credit: Wired.com, NSF, IceCube/University of Madison-Wisconsin and Chris Bickel
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