Lecture - Dr. Matthew Malek - Neutrino astronomy: Ghostly messengers from the cosmos

ABSTRACT:

The value of neutrinos as messengers from the cosmos was recognised by the Royal Swedish Academic of Science with the award of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics to Ray Davis and Masatoshi Koshiba for pioneering the field of neutrino astronomy. From Davis's first measurements of solar neutrinos in the 1960s at the Homestake experiment to Koshiba's detection of neutrinos from Supernova 1987A in the Kamiokande-II detector, neutrino astronomy has already accomplished much. Recent years have proven rather exciting, with the first detection of high energy cosmic neutrinos from the IceCube observatory at the South Pole in 2012. IceCube followed on from that significant achievement by detecting neutrinos from a blazar in 2018 that were paired with optical observations -- a remarkable 'first' for multi-messenger astronomy! In this talk, I review the history of neutrino astronomy, present the recent observations from IceCube, and describe future discoveries that astronomical neutrinos…