Student recently defended now heading to the South Pole

Marc Jacquart, an ex-masters student hosted and co-supervised by the IceCube group at NBI, was on his way to the University of Alberta to undertake a PhD with IceCube collaborators when he received the news that he was selected as winterover at the South-Pole. Only two winterovers are hired each year by the University of Wisconsin-Madison to spend 13 months at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in support of the science program and experimental operation 'on-ice'. After a stint of training in the US he has now been flown to the McMurdo research station on the Antarctic Coast and will soon continue to the South Pole where he will remain with the cohort of around 45 souls for the next year.

His work at NBI included projections of the upcoming IceCube Upgrade's sensitivity to properties of muon neutrino interactions in ice which may provide discrimination between the atmospheric neutrino and anti-neutrino fluxes. This separation would be the first of its kind at IceCube and would lay the basis for observing the matter effects of the earth's dense core in either the neutrino or anti-neutrino data, a smoking gun for the fundamental yet currently unknown hierarchy of the tiny and elusive neutrino masses.

This is work he hopes to continue in collaboration with the NBI group after he returns from the Antarctic.

We at NBI wish him all the best of luck!