The Telescope in the Ice

by Mark Bowen

  Kamiokande almost missed the flash  Sutton 1992, 192.

  Core collapse … transformed into an astronomy  Burrows 1989.

  Landau first postulated  Landau 1932.

  Baade … joined fellow astronomer Fritz Zwicky in proposing  Baade and Zwicky 1934.

  For many decades … stalwart theorists  Burrows 1987, 36.

  recent study  Pilachowski and Pace 2015; Croswell 2015.

  Solid-State DUMAND

  Francis was born  The basis for this account of Francis’s early life is a series of interviews he did for the Oral History Project at the University of Wisconsin (University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives 2007). I followed up with questions of my own.

  influential paper on cosmic rays  The paper was published the following year (Gaisser and Halzen 1985).

  groups from Kiel, Germany, and the University of Leeds presented evidence  Kiel: Samorski and Stamm 1983; Leeds: Lloyd-Evans et al. 1983.

  detected the first true high-energy gammas from the Crab Nebula  Weekes et al. 1989.

  radio method had been conceived by the Russian physicist  Askaryan 1961 and 1965; Markov and Zheleznykh 1986.

  My interest peaked … Russian colleagues  The quote is from an informal paper Francis once posted on the internet (Halzen 1995a). The solution was published in two papers (Halzen, Zas, and Stanev 1991; Zas, Halzen, and Stanev 1992).

  Francis,… Learned, and … Stanev later estimated  Halzen, Learned, and Stanev 1990.

  another line in the water in Arkansas  GRANDE (Gamma-Ray And Neutrino DEtector) was a vision for a Cherenkov detector inside an opaque plastic bag filled with purified water, to be located in an abandoned quarry in Arkansas. It never happened.

  letter of intent, based on a paper  Halzen and Learned 1988.

  halls once graced by Galileo himself  Reines 1992.

  Neutrino Detection in Clear Polar Ice  March, Halzen, and Learned 1988.

  first true high-energy gammas were detected from the Crab Nebula  Weekes et al. 1989.

  instrument finally detected pulsed gamma rays … from the Crab  This was the MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov) telescope in the Canary Islands (Aliu et al. 2008).

  Pomerantz chaired a conference at Bartol  Mullan, Pomerantz, and Stanev 1990.

  Morse presented  Morse and Gaidos 1990.

  that field investigations begin … neutrino bandpass filter  Halzen, Learned, and Stanev 1990.

  balloon experiment  Westphal et al. 1990.

  LC-130 Hercules transport plane, aka “Skibird”  People who work in the polar regions tend to become aircraft aficionados, not only because it’s the main way they travel to their work sites but also because the history of polar exploration in many ways tracks the history of airplane flight. When I was at Pole in late 1999, a so-called Basler 67, a reworked, ski-equipped, tail-dragging, DC-3 Dakota, came in, loaded with tourists who had coughed up $75,000 each to take this special side-trip on their regular Antarctic tour, and almost everyone at the station went out to the airstrip to admire and photograph the plane.

  received a call … never heard of them  Halzen 1995a.

  Enter Bruce

  I never was in the drilling business to be a driller  I have cribbed some of these interviews of and stories about Bruce from my book Thin Ice (2005).

  It was our first day … gentle champion  Frost 2006.

  his loyalty … soft-spoken nature  Madison.com 2006.

  letter to Nature  Lowder et al. 1991.

  it’s pretty clear … turned out not to be true  Francis’s remarks here are an amalgam of two different statements, one he made to an historian in Madison (University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives 2007) and the other he made to me, over dinner at an Italian restaurant in Madison in November 1998.

  His work suggested … 1,100 meters  Gow and Williamson 1975.

  Great God!… reward of priority  The quote from Scott’s diary comes from Huntford (1999, 497), one of the best books about adventure and exploration that has ever been written. The book demonstrates that Scott, far from being the romantic hero he has been made out to be, was actually a pompous bungler, who should have been court-martialed for reckless endangerment of his men, had he and they survived.

  many people go back year after year  New Zealander Anthony Powell (2014) gives a wonderful feel for life at McMurdo and for wintering over there in his film Antarctica: A Year on Ice.

  increase in carbon dioxide … first confirmed  Bowen 2005, 118–119.

  The Crossover

  Torneträsk  The Torneträsk project was named PAN: Particle Astrophysics in Noorland.

  Wisconsin Idea  Stark 1995.

  support it across the political spectrum  In February 2015, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker created an uproar when he rewrote the university’s mission statement, essentially erasing the Wisconsin Idea, in a budget that also called for sharp cuts in state aid to the university system. It was widely believed that he was burnishing his conservative credentials for what turned out to be a futile run for the U.S. presidency. Evidently, he didn’t realize how much the people of his state cherished the Idea. The backlash was general, it came from all over the state, and Walker quickly backtracked (Evans 2015; Bosman 2015).

  Koci went off on other adventures  Bowen 2005, chapters 13–15.

  altered the course of thinking  Ibid., 262; Broecker 1995.

  A Supernova of Science

  NEutrinos from Supernovae and TeV sources, Ocean Range  The name of the instrument was subsequently changed to “Neutrino Extended Submarine Telescope with Oceanographic Research.”

  attempt to deploy the first string for DUMAND-II  Grieder et al. 1995.

  NT-200  Sokalski and Spiering 1992.

  Christian writes  Spiering 2012, 531–2.

  told him about a paper  Barkov and Lipenkov 1984.

  interesting enough to find publication in Science  Askebjer et al. 1995.

  paper Domogatsky had pointed out to him  Barkov and Lipenkov 1984.

  paper presenting the theory  Price 1995.

  developed one of his own  AMANDA Collaboration 1995.

  more than three hundred meters  Askebjer et al. 1997.

  took her colleagues almost a year to accept the idea  Tilav et al. 1997.

  Francis … Jacobsen, and … Zas had shown  Halzen, Jacobsen, and Zas 1994. This paper expanded upon some earlier work by the DUMAND collaboration (Pryor et al. 1988).

  brief spike … might signal the formation of an exotic quark star  Abbasi et al. 2011c.

  would have detected about twenty thousand neutrinos from the same event  Halzen, Jacobsen, and Zas 1996.

  with minimal maintenance or investment in manpower and operation  Ibid.

  first-ever up-going muons  These were not “gold-plated” events that could be ascribed definitively to neutrino interactions, so the Baikal collaboration stopped short of claiming that they had detected the first atmospheric neutrinos (Belolaptikov et al. 1995 and 1997).

  hardware trigger  Wischnewski et al. 1997.

  updated paper  Halzen, Jacobsen, and Zas 1996.

  99.8 percent  Actually, as it turns out, the uptime of the supernova data acquisition system is different from that of the detector as a whole. In a talk at an IceCube collaboration meeting in the spring of 2015, John Kelley, who was in charge of detector operations, reported that the supernova uptime is about 98.7 percent.

  Doubling Down

  Comanche war parties  For an excellent and unsentimental portrait of Comanche war parties, see Gwynne (2010).

  Cherenkov telescope high on a mountainside in the Canary Islands  The instrument was named HEGRA (High-Energy Gamma Ray Astronomy).

  scattering dropped dramatically between one and two thousand meters  Hulth et al. 1997. The collaboration never publi
shed a journal article about this specific optical finding, because it wasn’t all that interesting from a physics standpoint and the problem could only be solved by Monte Carlo. A short article eventually appeared in the proceedings of a workshop on Simulation and Analysis Methods for Large Neutrino Telescopes that was held in conjunction with a collaboration meeting at Zeuthen more than two years later (Lowder and Woschnagg 1999).

  Buford Price announced triumphantly  Lowder et al. 1996.

  the SAGENAP committee wrote  Williams et al. 1996.

  detected the first-ever “gold-plated” … up-going neutrinos  Balkanov et al. 1998 and 1999.

  Glory Days

  master’s thesis by … Stuart Kleinfelder  Kleinfelder 1992 and 2003.

  iceman  Schwarz 2015.

  Night on the Ice

  a worker was thrown … from the rest of the population  Cockrell 2009.

  cold, dry air … TB clinic  Hutchison 2001.

  characterized by … ‘Antarctic stare’  Palinkas 2000.

  Problems are not swept … eight-month-long night  Cockrell 2009.

  first observed … by … Frederick Cook  Palinkas 2000.

  similarity between wintering over and spending extended periods of time in space  Palinkas 1989.

  template for the laws that may govern the colonization of the Moon and distant planets NSF administrator John Lynch (1990) gave a talk on this subject at the Bartol Conference in 1989, the one at which Francis Halzen’s talk launched Doug Lowder and Andrew Westphal on their unauthorized and ill-fated AMANDA feasibility study in West Antarctica.

  Polar T3 syndrome, apparently related to winterover syndrome  Palinkas et al. 1997.

  the more severe the environment, it seems, the lower the incidence of depression  Palinkas 2000.

  tempering effect  Ibid.

  The First Nus

  pick out five “interesting events” by eye  Jacobsen 1996a.

  Christopher got his feet wet in this business  Wiebusch 1994.

  a bit ‘too hot off the press’  Rankin et al. 1998.

  first credible up-going muon tracks ever detected by AMANDA  Bouchta 1998.

  presented the three gold-plated events  Balkanov et al. 1998 and 1999.

  building the case for a larger instrument  Halzen 1995b, 1995c, and 1996.

  says Francis, inscrutably  University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives, Oral History Project 2007.

  another workshop  Spiering 1999.

  most anticipated talk  Totsuka 1999; Fukuda et al. 1998.

  new theoretical estimates for neutrino emission by the Sun  Holmgren and Johnston 1958; Cameron 1958; Fowler 1958.

  back-to-back papers … in Physical Review Letters  Bahcall 1964; Davis 1964. Davis told the story of his experiment’s beginnings in his Nobel lecture (2002). The story is also told by Lande (2009) and Bahcall and Davis (1982).

  Sun would emit about 7.5 SNU  This is actually the prediction that obtained when Davis published his first results (Bahcall et al. 1968).

  7.5 neutrinos only every half-million seconds  Close 2010, 79.

  bought only about ten minutes of advertising on commercial television  Ibid., 76–7.

  revealed his first results  Davis 2002, 71; Davis et al. 1968.

  Bahcall would point out  Bahcall 1996b, 480. Bahcall also referred to the “problem” as a cause for rejoicing at the watershed meeting for IceCube that took place near NSF headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, on May 10, 1999.

  Bahcall’s prediction  Bahcall et al. 2001.

  Davis’s measurement  Cleveland et al. 1998.

  he was the only … successful experiment  Bahcall and Davis 1982.

  the flux of observable … neutrino flux  Pontecorvo 1967.

  oscillate into tau neutrinos, which were essentially invisible to the detector  Sobel and Suzuki 2008.

  SNO collaboration announced the solution  Ahmad et al. 2001. The finding was further confirmed the following year (Ahmad et al. 2002).

  prisoners … I feel like dancing!  Chang 2001.

  for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass  Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 2015.

  The Peacock and Eva Events

  included in Best American Science Writing 2000  Francis’s essay (1999) first appeared in The Sciences, a publication of the New York Academy of Sciences.

  the bit about Dr. Johnson’s dog  Learned is actually botching a sexist remark from Samuel Johnson here. “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs,” Boswell quotes Johnson as saying. “It’s not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” (Insight courtesy of Jason Newman.)

  found seventeen neutrino candidates  DeYoung et al. 1999.

  solid competing analysis  Biron et al. 1999.

  confirmed the nine-month-old Madison analysis  The situation was a bit more complicated than I’m putting it here: the Zeutheners had eliminated certain days of the year when they deemed that the detector had been acting oddly, so only fourteen of the original seventeen events were in their raw dataset. Of those fourteen, thirteen passed all the cuts in the Zeuthen analysis, and when they deigned to use their eyes to examine the fourteenth event, they realized it was “looking good” (Biron et al. 1999, 55) and that it had been eliminated because one of their cuts was too stringent.

  talk of lawsuits  This account of the COBE controversy comes from the book by Mather and Boslough (2008, xix, 232–45).

  report they produced in April  Augustine et al. 1997.

  Argentina once sent a woman … both conceived and born in Antarctica  Romero 2016.

  article presenting the up-going events they had discovered with AMANDA-B4  Andres et al. 2000.

  professors had proven incapable of managing the project  A sanitized version of the LIGO debacle is told by Cho (2016).

  Y2K at Pole

  No More Frontier Attitude  Wright 2012, 28.

  Sometimes You Get What You Ask For

  a rumored $2 million This account of the COBE story comes from the book by Mather and Boslough (2008, 232–45).

  Observation of high-energy neutrinos using Čerenkov detectors embedded deep in Antarctic ice  Andres et al. 2001. A subsequent, improved analysis was published the following year (Ahrens et al. 2002b).

  No New Starts

  Within days of George W. Bush’s inauguration  Bowen 2007, 159.

  nicknamed “no-new-starts”  Mervis 2001a.

  observed that a Ph.D. physicist generates about $1 million  This observation was made by Nima Arkani-Hamed, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study, in an interview included among the “extras” in Levinson (2015).

  There shouldn’t be … neutrino sources  This general approach to detecting dark matter particles in celestial bodies was first proposed by Katherine Freese (1986).

  paper … eventually published in 2002  Ahrens et al. 2002c.

  searched for supernovae  Ahrens et al. 2002a.

  searched for a point source  Ahrens et al. 2003a.

  searched for a diffuse flux  Ahrens et al. 2003b.

  searched for neutralinos coming from the Sun  Ackermann et al. 2006.

  propose that … turn the mine into a major underground research laboratory  Malakoff 2001.

  elbowing their way to the head of the line  Mervis 2001a.

  five major research facilities were funded  Mervis 2001b.

  article in the Chronicle of Higher Education  Borrego 2003.

  The Coming of Yeck

  told Science magazine that “he had lost the confidence”  AAAS 2002.

  memorandum formalizing their recommendation  Bement, Jr. 2004.

  Failure and Success

  Nygren’s team soon demonstrated  Stokstad 2005.

  As Quickly as It Al
l Began …

  two-part thesis  Ganugapati 2008.

  increasingly sophisticated study of the ice  Buford and his fellow ice property enthusiasts have not only provided information of an applied physics nature that has been crucial to the operation of IceCube, they have also contributed to the fields of glaciology and climatology (Aartsen et al. 2013c).

  Crossing the Threshold

  listening for a gnat’s whisper in a hurricane  LANL 1997.

  unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics  Wigner 1960.

  detect up-going muons with just their first hard-won string  Achterberg et al. 2006.

  equivalent to about a million years from the smaller one  Gary Hill pointed this out during a talk at an IceCube collaboration meeting in Berkeley in 2012.

  waviness in their arrival directions  Abbasi et al. 2010.

  search for neutralino annihilations in the Sun  Ackermann et al. 2006.

  second study of the Sun  Abbasi et al. 2009.

  fireball model  Waxman and Bahcall 1997.

  fireball models, involving neutrons rather than protons  Rachen and Mészáros 1998.

  Waxman had proposed GRBs as the answer  Waxman 1995.

  arXiv  The arXiv is a valuable repository of scientific papers, freely available to the public, that can be used to publish results quickly, before going through the lengthy peer-review process required of a journal article. This report was officially published in April in Physical Review Letters, which has a relatively speedy review process (Abbasi et al. 2011a).

  GRBs on Probation  Ahlers et al. 2011.

  Carl Sagan’s antimetabole … first place  Hartmann 2011.

  collaboration wrote in Nature  Abbasi et al. 2012.

  Four years later … IceCube still has not seen GRB neutrinos  Aarsten et al. 2016a

  Eli’s latest guess  Waxman 2014.

  focusing on that prospect for about a year  Halzen 2011.

  cosmogenic or GZK neutrinos  Ahlers et al. 2010.

  announced to great fanfare  Abraham et al. 2007.

  paper on Bert and Ernie  When Physical Review Letters published Aya’s paper in their July 9 issue (Aartsen et al. 2013a), the editors chose “Bert” to be the “cover boy.”

  Epilogue: The Dawn of Multi-Messenger Astronomy