Event

The Department of Physics invites you to a guest lecture on Thursday, September 12 at 1:00 p.m. This lecture will be on the topic "Astrophysics at the South Pole, Antarctica" and facilitated by Professor Suruj Seunarine, of the University of Wisconsin - River Falls.

About:

Science done by both the largest and smallest experiments at the South Pole will be presented. The South Pole in Antarctica is one of the highest, driest, and coldest places on earth to do science. Nonetheless, a wide variety of astrophysics and geo-space research is done there. One project is IceCube, a massive, billion-ton neutrino detector designed to observe elusive neutrinos from the most violent astrophysical sources in our universe. Neutrinos, sometimes called ghost particles, are almost massless particles with no electric charge that can travel from their sources to Earth with essentially no attenuation and no deflection by magnetic fields. Hence, they are ideal messengers from deep space, arriving undeflected from the galactic and extra-galactic sources that produce them. On the lower energy side of the cosmic ray spectrum, energetic particles produced by the Sun, or from sources in our own galaxy, can be studied with much smaller detectors like Neutron Monitors. A Neutron Monitor has been in operation at the South Pole for half a century. It is the ideal instrument to study solar energetic particles, and galactic cosmic rays and their modulation by solar activity. Highlights of results from both IceCube and the South Pole Neutron Monitors will be presented, along with the story of a personal journey from Trinidad and Tobago to doing research at the South Pole.