Jonathan Eisch will be heading south for winter break, but he will not be getting out his swimming trunks. It is a little too cold for that at the South Pole.
The UW-River Falls sophomore is taking part in IceCube, an international project based at UW-Madison. They are building an instrument at the South Pole that will detect small particles called neutrinos to map the sky and explore the origins of the cosmos. This instrument could also discover dark matter, the matter that is known to exist in the universe but cannot be seen.
\It's one of those tools that we will have to answer questions about the universe,"" said Evelyn Malkus, administrative program specialist for UW-Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center.
Funded by the National Science Foundation through 2009, IceCube is an extension of the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array, which first demonstrated the effectiveness of using ice to detect neutrinos, uncharged subatomic particles traveling through the universe.
""AMANDA is the small version of IceCube,"" said Robert Morse, professor of astrophysics at UW-Madison, principle investigator of AMANDA and logistics and deployments coordinator for IceCube. ""It's the prototype, you could say.""
The deep-ice portion of IceCube will contain 5,000 neutrino detectors and cover a space nearly three-quarters of a mile wide and tall, and one and a half miles below the surface of the ice.
The detectors, connected to computers by long cords, are lowered into deep holes drilled using hot water, then frozen into the ice like beads on a string, spaced to detect neutrinos by the presence of a blue cone of light formed when a neutrino interacts with water.
""It's like the wake behind a boat or a sonic boom,"" Malkus said.
The detectors pick up that light and create a plot that shows where the neutrino came from, which might help answer some of the universe's unsolved mysteries.
Another part of IceCube called IceTop will detect cosmic rays from the sun using detectors on the ice surface. These rays will provide a background reading for the deep-ice detectors.
Eisch will spend the Australia summer-the equivalent to a bitter Wisconsin winter, Malkus said, but with 24-hour sunshine-building detectors for IceTop.
""What we're exploiting is the fact that he's a computer wizard,"" Morse said. ""NSF was concerned that we were sending down an undergraduate. But we said that when it comes to computing skills, some of our most talented people happen to be undergrads.\
