Grants and Contributions:
Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year (2017-2018 to 2018-2019).
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, located at South Pole Station Antarctica, is the world's largest neutrino detector. Optimized for neutrino energies between a few hundred GeV and tens of PeV, it is the premier facility for the study of high-energy neutrinos and indirect cosmological dark matter searches. In 2008 the original design for IceCube was augmented with a low-energy extension, called DeepCore, that reduced the threshold for the observatory to approximately 10 GeV and initiated an Antarctic-based particle physics program focused on neutrino oscillation measurements and indirect dark matter searches.
The IceCube and DeepCore detector arrays are operating with greater than 99% efficiency and the data analyses are reaching full sensitivity with high impact results, including the advanced studies of the high-energy astrophysical neutrino flux, world-leading indirect dark matter searches, and globally competitive neutrino oscillation measurements. Building on these successes, the collaboration is developing low-energy (PINGU) and high-energy extensions to IceCube to achieve fundamental neutrino measurements and identify the sources of the highest energy neutrinos leading to key tests of the standard model.
The Canadian IceCube program is lead by 6 faculty members at the University of Alberta and SNOLAB. This is a leading group within the collaboration in all aspects of the on-going data analyses for the full energy range accessible by the detector. The group’s activities include novel developments in calibrations, new reconstruction algorithms and advanced techniques in the Monte Carlo simulations, designed to reduce the primary detector systematic uncertainties. Our high-level physics analyses are primarily focused on measurements of atmospheric neutrino oscillations near 20 GeV, the atmospheric neutrino flux, indirect dark matter searches, and studies of high-energy neutrinos for precision measurements of the neutrino flavour ratio and tests of Lorentz violation. Recognition by the international IceCube collaboration of the Canadian contributions has come through current appointments of PI Grant as the co-convenor for the PINGU low-energy extension and chair of the Publications Committee, Clark as the analysis coordinator for the PINGU project, and Kopper as co-convener for the Diffuse neutrino working group.
Requested in the proposal is funding to maintain the current core IceCube analysis activities and to continue the development of the future detector upgrades. The current IceCube Canada groups include a Banting Fellow, 2 NSERC supported postdoctoral fellows, 2 continuing PhD graduate students, 3 MSc students and 3 undergraduate researchers. Support for additional graduate and undergraduate researchers, travel expenses to facilitate the group's role in this unique international collaboration, and common fund contributions are requested.