Wednesday, January 13, 2021

IceCube has won the American Astronomical Society's Bruno Rossi Prize

 

 


The American Astronomical Society has awarded the 2021 Bruno Rossi Prize   to Francis Halzen and the IceCube Collaboration "for the discovery of a high-energy neutrino flux of astrophysical origin." 

We are very proud of this award, which reflects on both the construction of IceCube and on the data analysis (plus help from Mother Nature, for making the flux large enough to be detectable).  The announcement is posted at

https://head.aas.org/rossi/rossi.recip.html#2021_ic

and there is an IceCube press release at

 
The prize is named after the Italian physicist Bruno Rossi,who was one of the pioneers of cosmic-ray physics.  He won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of coincidence circuits, which he used to show that large groups of cosmic-ray particles reached the ground simultaneously, i. e. that very high-energy cosmic-rays produce air showers consisting of large numbers of particles.