The wondrous magical world of the IceCube Lab is where all the data from inside the ice is collected and processed.  Each of the ~5000 Digital Optical Modules (DOMs) is connected by a wire to this one central hub.  By the way, each DOM has it’s own name so it’s easy to remember the problematic ones.  The universities that made them gave them names like “graphophobia,” “wormwood,” and “ettringite” among others.

To get there you walk about a mile from station – the red flags take you to the “Dark Sector” – the area around the south pole where radio waves are kept to a minimum.  You have to turn off your station radio and Bluetooth to be out there, otherwise you can interfere with the SPT and BICEP experiments. The many green flags take you from that turn to the ICL. I hear you sometimes have to listen for the red ones when it’s really dark or windy out.

The cables from the DOMs come in one of the two large cylinders on the side (you can see one of the cylinders and part of the other in the picture at the top) and into our server room.  After traveling ~2 miles, the copper connects through a patch panel.

Buried in that pile are a set of cables used to test how much the ice is tilting and shearing – we went and fished them out to measure some voltages relating to how much the ice tilts and moves.  The cables pug into racks on the other side – each cable supports 4 DOMs and each machine has 15 cables – 1 string per machine.

Also in these racks are machines to process the data looking for interesting things and infrastructure machines to keep all of the computers talking to each other and happy.  When we’re there, we can manage the servers from the neighboring control room.  Note the ESD jackets – we are very worried about static hurting the computers down here.

Above the server room is the roof where you can go to manage the antenna shack and get some amazing views.  It is really windy up there, so if you are just coming out in your ESD jacket, you don’t want to spend too long.

SPT on the left there get interference from radio, and BICEP actually gets some pretty bad background.  Both of them are located on top of IceCube – IceCube covers a huge area.  It needs to, too.  It is a neutrino detector, and neutrinos very rarely interact, so you have to watch a ton of space for their signature.  Sadly, a lot of out background comes from cosmic ray, so much of the processing goes to telling the difference.  This was succinctly put by the useful IceCube hotline sign hanging in the ICL: