Detecting Neutrinos in the Antarctic Ice Shelf![]()
April 2012 – The University of California in Irvine is embarking on an ambitious research project to detect and count ultra-high energy neutrinos coming from the Afar depths of the universe. They have selected Afar Communications to provide the wireless network that retrieves the data captured by an array of detectors, which, when fully deployed, will consist of 960 stations in the Antarctic, covering a 30 x 30 km square.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles that
have no electrical charge and until recently were thought to be
massless. Most neutrinos traversing the earth are generated in the
Sun but the UC Irvine team is interested in the ultra-high energy
neutrinos that come from the far regions of the universe.
The UC Irvine team, led by principal
investigator Steven Barwick, developed a neutrino detector consisting
of broadband radio antennas, pointing down and buried in the ice
shelf, to detect radio pulses that result from the extremely rare
collision of a high energy neutrino and an atom in the ice. The plan
is to deploy a 960 detector array (named ARIANNA for Antarctic Ross
Ice shelf ANtenna Neutrino Array ) which will record those radios
pulses and then transmit that data, through the Afar radios, to the
McMurdo station in the Antarctic.
Several stringent requirements for the
radio communication system led to the selection of the Afar
radios:
The engineers at Afar worked closely
with UC Irvine to provide a solution that met these demanding
requirements. In 2012 UC Irvine successfully deployed four detector
stations, each with an Afar radio, communicating with another Afar
radio at the top of Mt. Discovery (46 km away), which then relays the
data to a radio at the McMurdo station (75 km).
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