World's Strangest Telescope - The IceCube

[Fraser]

Since the 1950s and the beginning of the "space race" scientists have wanted to practice astronomy and particle physics using high-energy neutrinos. So what's stopping them? The challenge of building the kilometer-sized observatory they predict is needed to do the science. Enter IceCube, a revolutionary new design in neutrino detecting telescopes. [...]

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[trinitree88]

Since the 1950s and the beginning of the "space race" scientists have wanted to practice astronomy and particle physics using high-energy neutrinos. So what's stopping them? The challenge of building the kilometer-sized observatory they predict is needed to do the science. Enter IceCube, a revolutionary new design in neutrino detecting telescopes. [...]

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Fraser. While I appreciate Tammy Plotner's short synopsis for the readers, it stretches a few things.
1.Neutrinos will stop in degenerate matter that is sufficiently dense (such as in a core collpse supernova)...the expression is "neutrino opacity".
2. The muons that are observed in Ice Cube travel faster in the ice than light can...so it's Cherenkov radiation from their superluminal shock fronts (similar to a supersonic boom)..that radiates away light, and it's not quite fluorescence, which has spectral peaks from excited electrons, but rather is continuous, with a large proportion being radiated in the ultraviolet. We only see the violet tail of the radiation as that bluish glow.
3. A key feature of the Antarctic ice is that entrained bubbles of gas slowly work their way to the surface under it's quasi-plastic glacial flow, and the resulting ice is very clear, allowing photodetectors to do their work. I'm impressed with the particularly nice design, guys and gals.
4. Not all neutrinos are "tiny". Like photons, they have wavelengths. Radio waves have wavelengths that are huge, and every photon has a neutrino counterpart. E=hv applies to both. What is small for neutrinos is their probability of interaction. That is a product of flux (phi) and cross-section (sigma). Sigma is tiny, which is what allows trillions of neutrinos to flow through our heads as we read this, with almost no effect.
pete

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation