SLAC Today
During the first week of summer in the Northern Hemisphere, SLAC will be home to a mini-Antarctica. Scientists are using a ten-ton block of ice in End Station A to calibrate the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), a radio antenna array that will fly over the South Pole on a NASA balloon to search for ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrinos. “These neutrinos are bound to exist, but no one has ever observed them,” said Pisin Chen of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), principal investigator for the test of ANITA. “Neutrinos don’t like to interact, so we need an effective way to see them. We need a huge target, like the South Pole ice.”