It takes ice — and lots of it — for Thomas Gaisser to do his job.
And it can’t be just any old ice from a freezer — even one with the most sophisticated filter.
To catch what Gaisser is after, you need the purest ice on Earth.
That’s what has landed Gaisser and a team of University of Delaware researchers in one of the iciest, coldest, most austere places on the planet: the South Pole.
They’re after neutrinos — subatomic particles produced during cosmic explosions a very long time ago that are so small, they can pass through solid objects and never collide with molecules.