Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
At the APS Global Physics Summit, physics doesn’t just happen in lecture halls—it spills out onto the ice.
Against the backdrop of the annual Quantum Hockey game, Clara Nellist meets Alicia Mand (University of Wisconsin–Madison) to talk about one of the most extreme discoveries in astrophysics: the highest-energy neutrino ever detected.
In 2023, the KM3NeT detector observed a neutrino with an energy of around 220 petaelectronvolts (PeV)—far beyond what we can produce in accelerators like the LHC. Events like this may originate from the most powerful environments in the Universe.
Alicia’s work with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a cubic-kilometer detector buried deep in Antarctic ice, follows up on this event to search for its source. IceCube detects neutrinos by capturing tiny flashes of light produced when they interact in ultra-clear ice—turning the Antarctic ice sheet into a giant particle detector.
Her results place new constraints on where this extraordinary neutrino could have come from, while ongoing upgrades to IceCube are improving sensitivity to even more signals across a wide range of energies.
It’s a reminder that at APS, physics happens everywhere—from deep under Antarctic ice… to right here on the rink, where physicists swap equations for hockey sticks but keep the same competitive energy.
Watch more from the APS Global Physics Summit on APS TV.
At the APS Global Physics Summit, physics doesn’t just happen in lecture halls—it spills out onto the ice.
Against the backdrop of the annual Quantum Hockey game, Clara Nellist meets Alicia Mand (University of Wisconsin–Madison) to talk about one of the most extreme discoveries in astrophysics: the highest-energy neutrino ever detected.
In 2023, the KM3NeT detector observed a neutrino with an energy of around 220 petaelectronvolts (PeV)—far beyond what we can produce in accelerators like the LHC. Events like this may originate from the most powerful environments in the Universe.
Alicia’s work with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a cubic-kilometer detector buried deep in Antarctic ice, follows up on this event to search for its source. IceCube detects neutrinos by capturing tiny flashes of light produced when they interact in ultra-clear ice—turning the Antarctic ice sheet into a giant particle detector.
Her results place new constraints on where this extraordinary neutrino could have come from, while ongoing upgrades to IceCube are improving sensitivity to even more signals across a wide range of energies.
It’s a reminder that at APS, physics happens everywhere—from deep under Antarctic ice… to right here on the rink, where physicists swap equations for hockey sticks but keep the same competitive energy.
Watch more from the APS Global Physics Summit on APS TV.
