We will not have internet access for the first few days in camp; if we go tomorrow (i.e. the weather cooperates), it will be a few days before my next post. It is also possible that we will never get internet, in which case it will be longer.
I am a physicist in the Nuclear Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, studying high energy neutrinos for astronomical purposes. Neutrinos are particles which interact very weakly, so they escape unimpeded from extremely dense sources. We want to pin down the sources (accelerators) for ultra-high energy cosmic rays.
This blog is about my trip to the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, to test prototype hardware for ARIANNA , a proposed ultra-high energy (above 100 PeV) neutrino detector that will be built there.
I also work on the IceCube neutrino detector, which is searching for neutrinos with somewhat lower energies - 100 GeV to 100 PeV. IceCube is smaller than ARIANNA, but studies a wider variety of physics, including cosmic-rays and a host of searches for exotic particles.
My travelling partner and colleague, Thorsten Stezelberger, is an engineer at LBNL.
I hope that you can have Internet access in order to continue receiving information about this very important research. I wish you good luck.
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