That’s a good question - I hadn’t considered the size of the interaction region. It’s actually really big!
These high energy neutrinos produce particles like muons that can penetrate pretty far through the detector. IceCube is a 1km cube of ice (with light detectors throughout) and if you look at images of events, many of the detectors will light up along the muon track length. So that’s hundreds of meters long. I think that would appear as a large and faint blue haze.
The Cherenkov light is pretty directional though (in the forward direction) so it won’t necessarily be a uniformly bright glow. It’ll depend somewhat on your viewing angle relative to the incoming neutrino.
That’s a good question - I hadn’t considered the size of the interaction region. It’s actually really big!
These high energy neutrinos produce particles like muons that can penetrate pretty far through the detector. IceCube is a 1km cube of ice (with light detectors throughout) and if you look at images of events, many of the detectors will light up along the muon track length. So that’s hundreds of meters long. I think that would appear as a large and faint blue haze.
The Cherenkov light is pretty directional though (in the forward direction) so it won’t necessarily be a uniformly bright glow. It’ll depend somewhat on your viewing angle relative to the incoming neutrino.
image source