Plans for two big new projects at the South Pole could be delayed for years by less lofty infrastructure issues and a limited electrical supply.
For decades, the South Pole has been a wonderland for physicists. They have stared into its exquisitely clear sky to study the afterglow of the big bang—the cosmic microwave background —and used the ice itself to spot nearly undetectable particles called neutrinos streaking from other galaxies. But plans for two big new projects at the pole could be delayed for years by less lofty infrastructure issues and a limited electrical supply.
NSF’s warning comes at a delicate time, as by October an ad hoc Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel must formulate a new 10-year plan for U.S. particle physics. “The problem is nobody knows” the true time frame for the projects, says Hitoshi Murayama, a theorist at the University of California, Berkeley, who chairs P5.
The CMB-S4 team is ready to start prepping the site as soon as it gets the go-ahead, hopefully in 2028, says John Carlstrom, an astrophysicist and team member at the University of Chicago. There is some urgency, he notes, as that year Japan plans to launch a spacecraft called LightBIRD that also aims to detect the primordial B modes. “To be honest, late in the decade works,” Carlstrom says. “But if late in the decade becomes late in the next decade, we’re in trouble.
But neither project can start before NSF fixes the infrastructure, Ulvestad says. The 7400-square-meter Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and the support buildings for IceCube and the current CMB telescopes are all sinking into accumulating snow and need to be elevated. And the 48-year-old, snow-covered Quonset huts used to store fuel, supplies, and vehicles need reinforcing.
Among the unresolved design issues is that of electrical power. CMB-S4 would require 170 kilowatts, 20% more than the current CMB telescopes. Eventually, IceCube-Gen2 would require 190 kilowatts, 2.5 times as much as IceCube. But power at the pole is limited, supplied by a diesel generator producing between 600 and 700 kilowatts.
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