IceCube observes seven potential tau neutrinos
phys.org
phys.org
Incredible to image a square kilometer of pure ice transformed into a sensor to detect rare subatomic particles!
Obviously I'm glad such people exist.
https://icecube.wisc.edu/science/beyond/
> IceCube-Gen2, a ten-cubic-kilometer detector
> The incredible clarity of the Antarctic glacier, revealed by the construction and operation of IceCube, will allow the spacing between light sensors to exceed 250 meters, instead of the current 125 meters in IceCube. The deployment of sensors on strings with larger spacings will enable the IceCube-Gen2 instrumented volume to rapidly grow at modest costs.
<https://www.wired.com/story/neutrino-detectors-could-be-used...>
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33573932-the-telescope-i...
What they do it totally out of my field, but I love hearing about it. It's a big source of pride in the university.
Unfortunately, the current hype around neural networks incentivizes scientists to use them even in situations where there is no need. (maybe in this case there's no other way, I'm not sure...)
As you say, it's easy for a neural network to pick up on simulation artifacts, rather than real physical features. The appendix of the original paper [1] explains how they quantify the failure modes of this approach. One kind of cool approach was training an adversarial network to corrupt simulated backgrounds to make them signal-like. The details are sparse, but it sounds like fooling the classifier required a level of corruption that would have been noticeable when comparing the simulation to data.
Can you do this wrong? Sure, but you can also go wrong with the feature engineering that particle physicists have used in cases where they don't trust machine learning. You won't really know if the methodology is sound unless you:
- read the paper
- follow some references (the paper is a short-form "Physical Review Letter", which means it's impossible to give any meaningful review using the text itself)
- hopefully find some more detailed description of what they did
The last point is often the difficult for particle physics collaborations, they are generally a bit protective of their data and internal working.
The systems folks have had a decade to iron out most of the bugs and there are fairly tightly scoped teams that work on different components. The failure rate of the DOMs is extremely low for something that's deep in the ice and impossible to physically access. They were very well built and designed, but it helps having people on call 24/7.
All the telescopes here have some sort of data center. Icecube happens to have a lot more computers because of the sheer number of detectors, and a desire to filter data so that preliminary/candidate detections can be sent North as soon as possible. Though unlike the other installations, IceCube is far more sensitive to downtime.
The Event Horizon Telescope setup at SPT probably takes the crown for superlatives in terms of data rate, clock accuracy, etc.
It strains credulity to the absolute maximum -- and yet these results are repeated, again and again, all over the world by different groups, using different equipment, based on different detection principles, using different methods.
No idea if this is true but…
Sounds innocent, but it creates a focused directed energy wave from a source array much larger than a measy square kilometer.
Every single time this science hits headlines I have at least (5) seconds of trying to understand how O'Shea Jackson suddenly had a scientific addendum to neutrinos and if that is as-cool or cooler than "No Vaseline".
I really do think it's named that because it looks like a cube and it's made in the ice. So, y'know, icecube.
I take it he's a well known? I've never heard of him.
>They were among the earliest and most significant popularizers and controversial figures of the gangsta rap subgenre, and the group is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential groups in the history of hip hop music
>Rolling Stone ranked N.W.A at number 83 on its list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time".