High Energy Neutrinos from the Cold: Status and Prospects of the Icecube Experiment

TL;DR

The paper reviews the status and prospects of the IceCube neutrino telescope, highlighting its role in neutrino astronomy, cosmic ray studies, and dark matter searches, based on data collected up to 2008.

Contribution

It provides an update on IceCube's deployment, data analysis, and integration with AMANDA, emphasizing its capabilities and future extensions in neutrino detection.

Findings

IceCube is the world's largest neutrino telescope as of 2008.

Data from AMANDA and IceCube are being analyzed for astrophysical insights.

Future plans include extending the detector's energy range and capabilities.

Abstract

The primary motivation for building neutrino telescopes is to open the road for neutrino astronomy, and to offer another observational window for the study of cosmic ray origins. Other physics topics, such as the search for WIMPs, can also be developed with neutrino telescope. As of March 2008, the IceCube detector, with half of its strings deployed, is the world largest neutrino telescope taking data to date and it will reach its completion in 2011. Data taken with the growing detector are being analyzed. The results of some of these works are summarized here. AMANDA has been successfully integrated into IceCube data acquisition system and continues to accumulate data. Results obtained using only AMANDA data taken between the years 2000 and 2006 are also presented. The future of IceCube and the extensions in both low and high energy regions will finally be discussed in the last section.