WoU-MMA: IceCube Data Analysis in the U.S. 2022-2025

This award provides funding for U.S. scientists to perform the scientific analysis of data taken with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (ICNO) located at the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The ICNO transformed one cubic kilometer of natural ice (at the depth from 1.4 to 2.4 km) into a giant particle detector, thus creating the world's largest neutrino detector.

Since its completion in 2010, the ICNO has detected neutrinos with energies spanning more than six orders of magnitude, from 10 GeV to beyond 10 PeV, identifying for the first time neutrinos reaching us from outside the solar system. (GeV = one billion electron volts; TeV = one trillion electron volts; and PeV = one quadrillion electron volts.) In 2017, the ICNO detected a neutrino with an energy of 290 TeV and its origin was pinpointed (again for the first time) to a supermassive black hole at a distance of about 3.5 million light years. This detection triggered an extensive campaign involving some twenty space- and ground-based telescopes that launched a new era in multi-messenger detection.

With a decade of data ICNO is producing strong evidence that the origin of cosmic rays is associated with the supermassive black holes at the centers of active galaxies.

The mystique of the South Pole environment and the compelling science of IceCube are an alluring mix. Besides its extensive coverage in newspapers and publications popularizing science, IceCube has a significant presence on social media and the World Wide Web. In the next three years, focused projects include the continued development of a virtual reality experience, an activity that has reached the beta stage for Zooniverse, and content for their successful high school MasterClasses.

These activities will also contribute to the training of the next generation of scientists by integrating graduate and undergraduate education with the IceCube technology development, astrophysical observations, and scientific analyses of the ICNO data. Recently, we have released a decade of IceCube neutrino observations to the public.

The U.S. groups have established a solid and successful record of analyzing data from IceCube. This award will enable a unified analysis program which will maximize the impact of increasingly interconnected efforts. The synthesis of information from multiple astrophysical messengers is now providing a powerful new tool for probing the Universe.

Neutrinos have revealed themselves as a powerful component of multimessenger astronomy by revealing the first sites where the highest energy messengers so far detected from the Universe are born and accelerated to extreme energies powered by the supermassive black holes lurking at the center of active galaxies. Thus, this award addresses and advances the science objectives and goals of the NSF's "Windows on the Universe: The Era of Multi-Messenger Astrophysics" program.

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.