Cosmic Ray Studies with IceAct: New Air-Cherenkov Telescopes at the South Pole

High-energy particles, known as cosmic rays, come from astrophysical events and are continuously shooting down through Earth’s atmosphere. They carry invaluable information about the universe, revealing insights into phenomena such as black holes, supernovae, and the conditions of the early universe. To find out more about the powerful processes that produce the particles, two IceAct telescopes have been deployed as a new sub-detector of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (ICNO) at the geographic South Pole. The IceAct telescopes are small, inexpensive, and cold-hardy air-Cherenkov telescopes designed to detect the light produced by cosmic rays as they interact in the atmosphere. This Cherenkov light, in coincidence with the data from IceTop (surface array) and IceCube allows us to reconstruct the primary cosmic ray’s energy and composition. In the next few years, IceAct plans to upgrade the two singular telescopes into a fly’s eye configuration to increase the field of view. In this presentation, we will discuss the machine learning analysis designed to study the IceAct data, which focuses on reconstructing the air shower parameters by utilizing simulated data. The goal of this machine learning project is to extend these methods to real data, enabling the accurate identification of cosmic particles. We will also discuss the construction and testing of one of the IceAct upgrade telescopes built over the summer at Marquette University and shipped to the South Pole for deployment this coming polar season.