Speaker
Description
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole is the leading facility
worldwide for scientific exploration in the field of neutrino astrophysics.
A more densely instrumented infill array, IceCube DeepCore, was added during
construction to lower IceCube's energy threshold where it could exploit the
massive volume of exceptionally clear ice at the bottom of IceCube to enable
competetive measurements of neutrino oscillation parameters. More than ten
years after the last IceCube string was deployed, the IceCube Collaboration
has embarked on a further Upgrade to the detector consisting of seven more
strings of advanced photodetectors to infill DeepCore, with sensitivity
greater than current and near future experiments to detect hints of new
physics beyond the best model of elementary particles that has stood for
over a half a century. Exploiting the opportunity provided by a restart of
deep-ice drilling at the site, new calibration devices will accompany this
instrumentation and will provide data for better modeling of the optics of
the deep glacial ice. Incomplete current knowledge of the ice introduces
systematics in IceCube that limit its precision for neutrino astrophysics.
Improved ice models can be fed back into reprocessing more than a decade and
a half of archived data to provide neutrino skymaps and other data products
with significantly improved resolution.
