‘IceCube, a Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole’

Eighty-seven holes over 2.4 km deep in the Antarctic ice cap are an extraordinary astronomical observatory. Into each hole is lowered a knotted string with detectors the size of basketballs. They detect the faint blue light emitted in the clear ice when neutrinos pass through the Earth. These neutrinos are cosmic messengers of the most violent processes in the Universe: giant black holes that devour stars in the heart of quasars, or gamma-ray bursts, the biggest explosions since the Big Bang. Neutrinos will tell us if there are dark matter particles trapped inside the Sun; particles that are also being sought by the Large Hadron Collider. They may perhaps reveal the origin of cosmic rays. This talk presents recent findings based on an initial sample of more than 100,000 neutrinos collected during the construction phase.