Light diffusion in birefringent polycrystals and the IceCube ice anisotropy

Understand

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory instruments about 1 km^3 of deep, glacial ice at the geographic South Pole with 5160 photomultipliers to detect Cherenkov light from charged relativistic particles.

• The experiment pursues a wide range of scientific questions ranging from particle physics such as neutrino oscillations to high-energy neutrino astronomy.
• Most of these efforts rely heavily on an ever more precise understanding of the optical properties of the instrumented ice.
• An unexpected light propagation effect, observed by the experiment, is an anisotropic attenuation, which is aligned with the local flow of the ice.