This time last year, I was working on the IceCube Neutrino Observatory as a grad student. The experiment is located at the South Pole and I traveled there to deploy the instruments that I was working on. I spent Christmas and New Years there along with 200 other humans, 900 miles away from anybody else. The experience was awesome.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a massive "telescope" which uses the ice at the South Pole as a target for neutrinos. Neutrinos are fundamental particles which are very difficult to detect- in the time it took you to read the last sentence about one billion neutrinos passed through you without any interactions. The goal of IceCube is ambitious: to produce a sky map of these hard-to-detect particles. In particular, IceCube is looking for neutrinos of extremely high energies which are produced in astronomical events such as gamma ray bursts and supernova explosions. Because neutrinos are so difficult to detect, IceCube's strategy is to capture them by instrumenting 1 km^3 of ice at the South Pole. Even more ambitiously, IceCube uses the earth itself as a noise filter. The telescope is embedded in the ice underneath the South Pole and looks downwards for the only particles that could possibly travel upwards through the entire earth, neutrinos.

There is no way I can do the project justice in such a short blog post. Even something as mundane as the 3km holes that IceCube drills in the ice are fascinating. Every part of the experience from going to Antarctica to deploying the instrumentation itself was amazing. Over the next series of blog posts, I'd like to get into more detail on the experiment and write a bit about Antarctica as well. In the mean time, if you want to learn more about IceCube check out the project's home page. Also, please send me an email and let me know if I messed up some details or if you'd like to hear more about something in particular.

Here is a video I made for my family from the pole.