Computing Power
A robust computing center (above) sits atop the 86 tubes packed with sensors (below) to process all of IceCube’s data.
IceCube detects 220 neutrino events each day, but its computers must filter out 100 million spurious signals to see them. The unwanted events are caused by high-energy particles (that aren’t neutrinos) slamming into Earth’s atmosphere.
Each legitimate neutrino event’s energy and direction is recorded, then beamed by satellite to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Helzen says the best data often comes from neutrinos traveling through the Earth and hitting the ice from below.
From the 1970s through the early 1990s, physicists thought building a neutrino detector like IceCube in deep ocean water would be less challenging. Yet after several crucial demonstrations, including the AMANDA experiment that's now incorporated into IceCube, Halzen says his colleagues have come around.
"Until we have similar detector in water, it's difficult to compare, but there are efforts underway to build one in the Mediterranean," Halzen says. "Still, there's a deep truth to something I like to say a lot: We can walk on our experiment. Once deployed, you can put a computing center right above the detector on the surface and crunch your data."
Images: IceCube/University of Wisconsin-Madison/NSF
