NPA Seminar, Brian Clark, UMD-College Park, “Chasing the Ghost Particle: Neutrino Astrophysics at the South Pole”

High energy (> TeV) neutrinos are unique messengers to the distant, high-energy universe. As chargeless and weakly interacting particles, neutrinos arrive undeflected and unattenuated from cosmic distances, giving us key insights to the properties of astrophysical accelerators at the highest redshifts. In this talk, I will discuss the ongoing work of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory to detect and study extraterrestrial neutrinos across a broad range in energies, from TeV to EeV. I will review how the IceCube detector, which is a cubic kilometer array of photomultiplier tubes buried at the South Pole, detects high energy neutrinos. I will then discuss the latest physics results of the detector, including efforts to measure and characterize the high energy neutrino flux and to find neutrino sources.
Host: Jorge Torres