Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 01/03/2013 - 09:36
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IceCube In-Ice Antarctic Telescope 2012

How does the Neutrino Detector detect neutrinos, and how is the data collected used to create a 'neutrino map'?

Mon, 01/07/2013 - 08:57

Anonymous

Read the journal entry.

Wed, 01/16/2013 - 17:53

Liz Ratliff

Thanks for your questions! There are two different ways that neutrinos are being detected. IceCube uses optical detectors to look for flashes of blue light that are created by muons. (Muons are created when neutrinos interact with the nucleus of an atom, which happens extremely rarely but it does happen sometimes.) ARA uses radio antennas to detect a set of radio waves. When a neutrino travels through certain materials, like ice, it produces a shower of particles that create a cone of radio waves. So, if the antennas see radio waves that have the right frequencies, then we know that there was a neutrino.The neutrino map is created based on the events that IceCube has detected. (An event is just what they call it when a neutrino has been detected.) As I understand it, the path of the neutrino can be determined based on the optical sensors that are triggered during the event. In other words, if you look at which detectors saw a flash of light, it looks like a scatter plot and you can draw a line of best fit through it. That line can be traced back into the sky to figure out where the neutrino came from. A neutrino map contains all of that information about the places of origin. So, the more neutrinos come from a particular area, the more red that part of the map is.
Here's a link to an example of a neutrino map that was made with data from AMANDA (a smaller, earlier project that was similar to IceCube):
http://www.isgtw.org/images/captured.jpg