Results from a Surface Array Prototype Station at the South Pole

The IceCube Observatory at the South Pole, renown for its astrophysical neutrino detection, is also an excellent detector for cosmic rays in the PeV to EeV energy range. This is due to the unique combination of the square-kilometer IceTop surface array, detecting electromagnetic particles and GeV muons from air showers, and the cubic-kilometer optical array deep in the ice, detecting TeV muons of the air showers. To mitigate the increase of the energy threshold due to snow accumulation above the existing ice-Cherenkov detectors of IceTop and to enhance the accuracy for air showers at higher energies, a new design for surface stations has been developed consisting of eight elevated scintillation detectors and three elevated radio antennas connected to a common local data acquisition. Thanks to the success of a prototype station operating at the South Pole since 2020, the same station design is planned for the future IceCube-Gen2 surface array which will enhance the aperture for surface-deep coincident events by a factor thirty and enable higher accuracy and statistics in the energy range of the still enigmatic transition from Galactic to extragalactic cosmic rays. This talk will provide an overview of results obtained with the prototype station at IceCube and present an outlook of the future plans for the IceCube-Gen2 surface array.