The AMANDA Project: The Antarctic Ice Sheet as a High Energy Particle Detector

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) project will imbed sensitive photomultiplier tubes about one kilometer deep in the Antarctic ice sheet at South Pole to use the ice itself as a Cherenkov detector for high energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin which have passed through the Earth. Additionally, AMANDA will be sensitive to neutrinos which are produced in the atmosphere near the north pole and can be used to make measurements of neutrino properties. Neutrino astronomy has, to date, been limited to detection of solar neutrinos and one brief burst from a supernova which appeared in the Large Magellanic Cloud in February 1987. Very recently several new sources of high energy gamma rays, which may also be neutrino sources, have been discovered by the Compton Observatory satellite and, most significantly, the atmospheric Cherenkov telescope on Mt. Hopkins, AZ. There should also be many detectable neutrino sources which are not detectable by gamma rays, or any other wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, because of intervening matter. Only just now is it becoming technically feasible to build neutrino telescopes and as one of the first generation of such instruments, AMANDA promises to be a large contributor to a new branch of observational astronomy.