The Present and Future of High-Energy Neutrino Astronomy

In the past decade, neutrino astronomy went from dream to reality with the IceCube collaboration producing observations of the very first neutrino sources in the sky. Last year, the diffuse emission of the Galactic Plane was observed in high-energy neutrinos, making it the first non-electromagnetic view of our own galaxy. Fundamentally, the IceCube detector is a particle physics detector, and astronomical observations are only possible by teasing out an astronomical signal hidden in dominating background rates that are many orders of magnitude higher. The successes of neutrino astronomy in the past decade opened a new field, and the current state of neutrino astronomy is evolving. With more future neutrino telescopes planned, the field is poised to make more discoveries.

Speaker: Naoko Kurahashi Neilson is a Professor in the Department of Physics at Drexel University.