RI: IceCube: the coolest way to detect neutrinos

The aptly named IceCube collaboration, a huge telescope buried in the crystal clear ice of Antarctica, has been running for 10 years. It’s there to detect neutrinos, an almost undetectable particle.

Join Jenni Adams as she discusses how these neutrinos could be the key to finding some of the highest energy sources in the Universe, some a million times more energetic then our sun.

In this talk, Jenni explores how neutrinos are cosmic messengers that can travel through the Universe. Why they barely interact with anything they pass through and the precise instruments and machinery required to detect them.

Jenni Adams research is in the areas of astroparticle physics and cosmology. Astroparticle physics involves research at the interface of astronomy and particle physics. It is a synergy which operates in both directions; particle physics is applied to better understand astrophysical objects as well as using the Universe as a laboratory for high-energy physics. Jenni's interests are in both theoretical and observational aspects.

Recent theoretical work has focussed on the oscillations of neutrinos escaping from supernovae, probing AGN models using gamma ray observations and supersymmetric dark matter models.
Jenni's group at the University of Canterbury are members of the IceCube collaboration which operates the IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole. The collaboration has achieved a series of break-through results discovering astrophysical neutrinos in 2013 and identifying the first source of these neutrinos in 2017.