Every time I see a documentary on it they emphasise how incredibly sensitive the photon detectors are. So I guess not.
Human eyes are also incredibly sensitive, and can detect single photons in specific circumstances. But to have the best chance of seeing anything, one would probably need to be inside the experimental setup, which would be logistically difficult.
I imagine it would be visible under the right conditions. It’s been demonstrated that the human eye can detect single photons. The Cherenkov photons follow an energy distribution, but for simplicity we can assume they are blue light (450 nm), which is 2.7 eV per photon. IceCube is designed to detect neutrinos with energies greater than 1 TeV. Assuming full conversion of neutrino energy to Cherenkov photons, that’s 370 billion photons per detection event. Pretty good odds on seeing that.
I wonder if the human eye would see just a simple faint blue neon-like flash, or like a little cascade of faint blue, or just what kind of shape we would see, does it stretch a few centimeters or meters or maybe even tens of meters?
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.
