Francis Halzen

AMANDA

In the 1990s, astrophysicists buried more than seven hundred sensors deep in the Antarctic ice cap to watch for the faint flashes of light produced by the passage of high-energy subatomic particles. These sensors comprised the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA), the first of a new generation of high-energy neutrino telescopes. Conceived in the late 1980s and constructed over a period of five years, AMANDA utilized the clear Antarctic ice as its detection medium and served as a proof-of-concept for IceCube. AMANDA remained in operation through 2009, when its successor, IceCube, was nearing completion but was already collecting and analyzing data from partial detector configurations.

The AMANDA project has been integrated into the IceCube project, for more information please see IceCube.