Transforming the Natural World into a Neutrino Telescope

by Will Thompson (Harvard University), Will Thompson (Harvard University)

Monday 9 Nov 2026, 12:45 → 13:45 America/New_York

D-122 (P. Grannis Seminar Room)

Neutrino astronomy is the science of finding clever ways to turn the natural world into a neutrino telescope. Because astrophysical neutrinos are rare and interact only feebly, observatories must monitor gigatons of target material. IceCube achieved this by instrumenting a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice with more than 5,000 photosensors, leading to the discovery of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. This discovery has raised new questions, such as the flavor composition of the astrophysical neutrino flux, which becomes difficult for IceCube to measure at high energies. TAMBO, a next-generation observatory to be located in the Peruvian Andes, takes a different approach, using a mountain as its target. TAMBO will detect tau neutrinos that interact in one wall of a deep valley and produce tau leptons that decay in the valley, creating air showers measured by a detector array on the opposite slope.

In this talk, I will describe IceCube’s design, its major discoveries, and the open questions it has raised. I will then discuss how TAMBO’s approach complements IceCube’s in-ice design, and present the status of TAMBITO, the first stage of TAMBO, now under construction.