ARIANNA, station #1

Here's a bit of the science that brings us to this extremely empty part of the world: 

---

The ARIANNA project goal is to detect ultra-high energy neutrinos. At present, physicists have detected neutrinos produced from our sun's fusion reaction, nuclear reactors, particle accelerators, and cosmic ray showers. Cosmic rays are a real long-term mystery: we've known that there are high energy particles that hit Earth's atmosphere and produce a shower of particles, but we don't know where they come from, how they are accelerated or their exact composition. ARIANNA hopes to see neutrinos produced when the highest of all energy cosmic rays hit the cosmic background radiation outside the galaxy and the kinetic energy is transferred to a neutrino. Seeing the neutrinos would help us understand cosmic rays, since neutrinos will travel through space affected very little by the stars and galaxies they pass.

When neutrinos hit the ice shelf, they cause a shower of particles much like when cosmic rays hit the atmosphere, and those produce radio waves. The radio waves are a superluminal shock wave because the shower is moving faster than light would travel through ice (which is slower than light would go through vacuum). ARIANNA stations record signals from radio antennas that can distinguish that type of radio signal. So one cool part of the project comes from the following question: if the neutrinos come down from the sky and hit the ice producing a radio pulse which is travelling down...how do we detect that with antennas on the top of the ice? The answer is that radio waves that hit the *bottom* of the ice shelf, where the ocean water surface is, reflect back up almost completely (remember the ice shelf is 572 meters thick here).

---

So our tasks here this year are to: A) setup a new neutrino detector (station #2), B) examine station #1 which was setup here in 2009 and revitalized in 2010, and C) examine the radio wave properties of the ice shelf. 

The first problem was finding the old station, because about 5 feet of snow had covered the area. On Wednesday 11/30, we used notes from 2010 and a metal detector to locate it. Here's a couple pics of before during and after 5 of us dug for 2-days, showing the solar tower and metal station box at the bottom of the 8-foot pit.

Our daily work schedule here starts with breakfast at 7:30am in the main tent and ends with dinner around 6pm. After dinner we relax a bit and eventually turn in to our individual small tents (like mine shown here). I think these shots are all taken at night when the sun is in the South sky, and the temperature drops a little(Joulien on the left, Julia in the middle, Jordan on the right).