High School Students Complete Real-World Data Science on Antarctic Neutrino Experiment at Mines

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.