A Scientist Working on the ‘IceCube’ Neutrino Detector Explains the Nobel Prize–Winning Technology
Source: Wired ·
“Detecting a neutrino is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” says Juan Carlos Díaz Vélez, who breaks down why researchers are looking for the cosmic particles under the Antarctic ice.
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“for some reason, I woke up at 5:30, and the first thing I did was go to the New York Times website to check the headlines,” Juan Carlos Díaz Vélez recalls of the previous morning. “To my great surprise, there was a breaking news story: Francis Halzen had just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. I immediately started sending messages, only to discover that my colleagues in Europe had found out long before I did.” Juan Carlos Díaz Vélez works at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The new Nobel laureate is his boss. “When I arrived at the WIPAC offices, everyone was smiling and congratulating one another,” Díaz Vélez says. “We gathered in the conference room to watch the press conference with Francis Halzen, who was in Italy at the time attending a conference. We’ll wait for his return to celebrate, and in the meantime, we’ll keep working on the neutrino study, because this work never ends.” That work is detecting an elusive…