So my webpage isn’t so empty, I thought I’d devote a post to talking about one of my favorite ongoing experiments, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. IceCube is a particle detector that detects scattered Cherenkov Radiation from charged particles that result from (exceedingly) rare neutrino interactions speeding through the Antarctic ice.

As an undergraduate I had some hands-on experience with the reconstruction process– the process of interpreting the sensed light and reconstructing information about the neutrino event that caused it (Where did the neutrino come from? How fast was it going? What flavor was it?).

The whole process always reminded me of the scene in The Dark Knight where Batman reconstructs a bullet from the shards to find the thumb print made when the bullet was first loaded.

My specific research involved the data-driven characterization of the IceCube optical sensors. Because the reconstruction methods were generative models, this basically had the effect of improving the prior distribution. Why bother, you ask? Because PINGU needed a better model if it wanted to accurately reconstruct low energy neutrino interactions.

Also in my time, I was made aware of a band of (possibly) the most insane people left on the planet, IceCube “Winter Overs”.

Winter Overs are modern-day Vikings who agree to spend more than a year at the actual station in Antarctica, sustaining themselves only on home-made snow cones and their love of science (I assume). If there are positions open, consider applying!