Dr. Matthias Plum, assistant professor of physics at Mines, is shown here
working at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. Dr. Plum will
lead this year’s IceCube Masterclass for high school students at Mines. Photo
credit: Yuya Makino, IceCube/NSF.
South Dakota Mines will host more than 50 high
school students on April 7 who will take part in the annual IceCube Masterclass.
During the workshop, the students will get a chance to work with the actual
dataset measured by international IceCube Neutrino Observatory,
located at the geographic South Pole.
South Dakota Mines Associate Professor of Physics, Xinhua
Bai, Ph.D., leads a unique
experiment at IceCube that utilizes the immense dataset measured by the
observatory. Bai and fellow researchers
combine the signals in multiple detectors from outer-space to paint the
most-clear picture possible of our universe.
In the IceCube Masterclass, high school students
from across the region will get to dive into the data generated by the
experiment and learn how to “fish” for unique signals generated by phenomena
coming in from outer space.
This year’s Masterclass will be led by Matthias Plum,
Ph.D., assistant professor of physics at Mines who worked previously worked at
the South Pole studying the chemical composition of charged cosmic rays measured
by the IceCube. His current work includes assisting in the development and
construction of the next-generation observatory IceCube-Gen2.
The IceCube Masterclass hands-on workshop runs from
9 a.m.–3 p.m. on April 7, 2022, in the Electrical Engineering and Physics (EEP)
building on the Mines campus. The class includes 51 students and four teachers
from both South Dakota and Wyoming.