Maintenance and operations costs for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory
Forskningsinfrastruktur VR IceCube 2017
Details
- Period: 2018-01-01 – 2025-12-31
- Funder: Swedish Research Council
- Type of funding: Research infrastructures
Description
Infrastructure: IceCube
Project title: Maintenance and operations costs for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory
Main applicant: Olga Botner, Division of High Energy Physics
Funder: Research infrastructures of national interest from the Swedish Research Council
We apply for the Swedish contribution to M&O costs for IceCube for the years 2019-2023. The application is a continuation of the operations grant VR 821-2013-1673. The annual contribution rate has been determined in 2010 by the IceCube International Oversight and Finance Group where Sweden is represented by VR and reconfirmed in the cooperative agreement between the National Science Foundation, USA, and IceCube's host laboratory University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2016. IceCube is the world’s largest neutrino telescope embedded in the clear glacier ice at the South Pole, designed to detect high-energy neutrino radiation from cosmic sources. In 2013, IceCube discovered high-energy neutrinos of extraterrestrial origin. This represents a breakthrough and opens the path towards neutrino astronomy. Neutrino emission is predicted in models of the mechanisms powering active galaxies and for processes causing gamma ray bursts.
The design of the telescope allows, however, also research into other topics like searches for dark matter particle candidates, studies of neutrino properties, searches for neutrinos from supernova explosions within the Milky Way and studies of cosmic ray anisotropies. The Swedish groups in Stockholm and Uppsala have been involved in the development of ice-based neutrino telescopes from the very outset i.e. for more than 20 years, participating originally in the AMANDA project which proved that the concept of an ice-based neutrino observatory is viable. AMANDA was the prototype for the much larger IceCube array, deeper in the ice, which was completed in December 2010 and is producing competitive results including the first observation of neutrinos with energy above 1 PeV. This is the energy range where the universe is opaque for gamma rays from beyond our galaxy. The DeepCore in-fill array allows observation of the full sky including the region close to the galactic center and studies of lower energy phenomena like neutrino oscillations.