by Dr Doug Cowen
(Penn State)
The IceCube neutrino observatory, buried deep in the ice at the South Pole, has detected neutrinos that span over five orders of magnitude in energy. Fulfilling one of its original stated goals of discovering cosmological ultrahigh energy neutrinos, its large instrumented volume also provides us with a surprisingly powerful instrument for studying neutrino oscillations with an unprecedented statistical sample of energetic atmospheric neutrinos.
In this presentation we will describe the IceCube detector and focus on its current and future atmospheric neutrino oscillation measurements with DeepCore, IceCube's low-energy in-fill array. We will also describe a new proposed low-energy extension, the Precision IceCube Next Generation Upgrade (PINGU), highlighting its ability to measure one of the remaining fundamental unknowns in particle physics, the neutrino mass hierarchy.