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Physics News Update
Number 419 (Story #3), March 19, 1999 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein

THE ANTARCTIC MUON AND NEUTRINO DETECTOR ARRAY (AMANDA) watches the sky for TeV neutrinos. It does this by looking inward: using the whole of the earth to screen out all other particles, the detection scheme counts on the fact that only neutrinos can navigate safely through our planet. Emerging into the south polar ice mass, the high energy neutrinos (coming from uncharted violent astrophysical processes) will occasionally interact with atoms, creating muons whose potent energy is partly converted into cones of (Cerenkov) light that can be seen by strings of photodetectors buried in the ice. (The holes for the detectors, stretching down as far as 2.4 km, are the deepest ever carved with hot water.) Neutrino interactions are rare under any circumstance; 20 unambiguous neutrino scattering events have been fully analyzed so far, but up to 100 per year are expected shortly. These events are in a neutrino energy range, above 50 GeV, far different from that of detectors such as Super Kamiokande, in which oscillations of lower-energy neutrinos (less than 10 GeV) were observed in 1998. With AMANDA the muon trajectory (and essentially that of the parent neutrino) can be determined to within about three degrees. Neutrinos with energies below 1 TeV would probably come from cosmic ray events in our atmosphere. For energies above 1 TeV, the neutrino sources are expected to be gamma-ray bursters and active galactic nuclei. (Physics Today, March 1999.)