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Buried in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice at the South Pole sits the world’s largest particle detector. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory catches neutrinos, nearly massless particles that stream unimpeded from the most violent events in the universe, by watching for the faint flashes of light they produce on the rare occasions they interact. Over the past decade it has opened a genuinely new window on the sky, identifying cosmic neutrino sources and testing fundamental physics in regimes no laboratory can reach.
In this colloquium I will give an accessible introduction to how and why we detect neutrinos in ice, but my main focus is more personal: what it is actually like to build an experiment in the harshest environment on the planet. Drawing on photographs and video from my two seasons at the South Pole working on the IceCube Upgrade, I will share the logistics, the surprises, and the daily reality of deep-ice physics, closing with a look ahead to the next-generation detector now being designed.