Management and Operations of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory 2021-2026

This award funds the continued management and operations (M&O) of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (ICNO) located at the South Pole Station (Antarctica) in the deep ice. The core team of researchers and engineers maintain the existing neutrino detector infrastructure at the South Pole from their home institutions that guarantee an uninterrupted stream of ICNO's scientifically unique, high-quality data.

Effective coordination of joint efforts by the M&O personnel and scientists from within the IceCube Collaboration has yielded significant increases in the performance of this cubic-kilometer detector with time. The broader impacts of the ICNO/M&O activities are strong, involving postdoctoral, graduate, and (in some cases) undergraduate students in the day-today operation and calibration of the cubic-km neutrino detector.

The outstanding physics results produced by ICNO in the past decade and its extraordinary location at South Pole have a high potential to excite the imagination of high school children and the public in general at a national and international level.

The IceCube cubic-km detector, designed as a discovery instrument, has delivered world-leading scientific results across six orders of magnitude in neutrino energy - from measurements of atmospheric neutrino oscillations in the previously unexplored 10 to 60 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) energy range to observations of cosmic neutrinos with energies exceeding 10,000 teraelectronvolts (TeV). Among them is the first detection of a Glashow resonance event, a 6,300-TeV antielectron neutrino interaction with an atomic electron in the ice producing a W boson.

The discovery of high-energy cosmic neutrinos by IceCube has established an appropriate role of neutrino astrophysics as "a window" in observing the extreme Universe. Above 100 TeV, neutrinos are unique messengers to pinpoint cosmic accelerators that power the large fluxes of observed cosmic rays, and on September 22, 2017, an IceCube alert led to such a cosmic ray potential source - the blazar TXS 0506+056.

IceCube will remain a unique tool for the delivery of the neutrino component of multimessenger astrophysics as well as a broad range of neutrino and cosmic ray science. The ICNO has set limits on Dark Matter annihilation, made precision measurements of the angular distribution of cosmic ray muons, and characterized in detail physical properties of the Antarctic 2.6-km thick ice sheet at South Pole.

The discovery of high-energy cosmic neutrinos by IceCube with a flux at the level anticipated for those associated with high-energy gamma- and cosmic-ray accelerators brightens the prospect for identifying the sources of the highest energy particles. The prospect to do neutrino physics with a cosmic beam at PeV energies may turn IceCube into a tool to explore neutrino physics beyond the Standard Model.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.