IceCube-Gen2: the window to the extreme Universe

Abstract

The observation of electromagnetic radiation from radio to γ-ray wavelengths has provided a wealth of information about the Universe. However, at PeV (1015 eV) energies and above, most of the Universe is impenetrable to photons. New messengers, namely cosmic neutrinos, are needed to explore the most extreme environments of the Universe where black holes, neutron stars, and stellar explosions transform gravitational energy into non-thermal cosmic rays. These energetic particles have millions of times higher energies than those produced in the most powerful particle accelerators on Earth. As neutrinos can escape from regions otherwise opaque to radiation, they allow an unique view deep into exploding stars and the vicinity of the event horizons of black holes. The discovery of cosmic neutrinos with IceCube has opened this new window on the Universe. IceCube has been successful in finding first evidence for cosmic particle acceleration in the jet of an active galactic nucleus. Yet, ultimately, its sensitivity is too limited to detect even the brightest neutrino sources with high significance, or to detect populations of less luminous sources. In this white paper, we present an overview of a next-generation instrument, IceCube-Gen2, which will sharpen our understanding of the processes and environments that govern the Universe at the highest energies. IceCube-Gen2 is designed to: (a) Resolve the high-energy neutrino sky from TeV to EeV energies (b) Investigate cosmic particle acceleration through multi-messenger observations (c) Reveal the sources and propagation of the highest energy particles in the Universe (d) Probe fundamental physics with high-energy neutrinos IceCube-Gen2 will enhance the existing IceCube detector at the South Pole. It will increase the annual rate of observed cosmic neutrinos by a factor of ten compared to IceCube, and will be able to detect sources five times fainter than its predecessor. Furthermore, through the addition of a radio array, IceCube-Gen2 will extend the energy range by several orders of magnitude compared to IceCube. Construction will take 8 years and cost about $350M. The goal is to have IceCube-Gen2 fully operational by 2033. IceCube-Gen2 will play an essential role in shaping the new era of multi-messenger astronomy, fundamentally advancing our knowledge of the high-energy Universe. This challenging mission can be fully addressed only through the combination of the information from the neutrino, electromagnetic, and gravitational wave emission of high-energy sources, in concert with the new survey instruments across the electromagnetic spectrum and gravitational wave detectors which will be available in the coming years.

Testing Hadronic Interaction Models with Cosmic Ray Measurements at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

“…Future work improving measurements of low-and high-energy muons will provide additional input relevant for the understanding of air shower physics. The extension of the Observatory with a larger in-ice detector and new surface detectors [17][18][19] will further allow to expand this work with more complementary measurements.…”

Study of mass composition of cosmic rays with IceTop and IceCube

“…In the upcoming decade, IceCube Collaboration intends to enhance the current detector to the next-generation instrument, called IceCube-Gen2 [10]. The enhancement will add new detectortypes to the current detector.…”

Testing the stability of heavy dark matter with up-coming radio neutrino telescopes

“…In this work [7] we have used the future neutrino radio telescopes RNO-G [8], IceCube-Gen2 radio array [9,10] and GRAND [11] in order to explore the parameter space of heavy dark matter particles with masses in the range [10 7 − 10 15 ] GeV, focusing on the decay rather than in the annihilation due to the higher produced neutrino fluxes. We will assume that the neutrino telescopes will measure only the cosmogenic neutrino contribution or the newborn pulsars one and extract in this way the limits that we could place on the lifetime of the dark matter particles using the projected sensitivities of the aforementioned telescopes.…”