February 16, 2005, Berkeley, CA--Construction is now underway for a telescope whose light collecting mirror will be buried more than a mile beneath the South Pole ice cap. Dubbed IceCube, because its array of detectors covers a cubic kilometer of ice, this telescope is designed not to capture starlight, but to study the high-energy ghostlike subatomic particles known as neutrinos.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researchers were responsible for the unique electronics package inside the digital optical modules (DOMs) that will enable IceCube to pick out the rare signal of a high-energy neutrino colliding with a molecule of water. A DOM consists of a pressurized glass sphere, the size of a basketball, that houses a photomultiplier tube to detect photons and convert them into electronic signals.
"Each of these DOMs is like a mini-computer server that you can log onto and download data from, or upload software to," said Robert Stokstad, of Berkeley Lab's Nuclear Science Division (NSD), who heads the Institute for Nuclear and Particle Astrophysics (INPA) and is the leader of Berkeley Lab's IceCube effort.
IceCube is an international collaborative effort made up of more than 150 scientists, engineers and computer scientists, from 26 institutions in the United States, Europe, Japan and New Zealand. The principle investigator for the project is Francis Halzen, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of physics.
Originating from the Milky Way and beyond, and traveling to Earth virtually unobstructed, high-energy neutrinos serve as windows back through time, and should provide new insight into questions about the nature of dark matter, the origin of cosmic rays, and other cosmic issues.