Faculty:

Darren Grant

Scientists and Post Docs:

N.N.– senior postdoc position starting June 2010 (pending successful Discovery Grant proposal)

Students:

T.B.D. – 2 ,potentially, starting Fall/Winter 2010.

Explanation:

 An Canadian National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery Grant has been submitted, as of November 1, 2009, to support an IceCube research group’s activities at the University of Alberta. The proposed budget requests a postdoctoral fellow, to start June 2010, and initially two graduate students, to start Fall/Winter 2010 semesters, and a third graduate student to start in 2012. The budget also includes a request for annual common fund contributions of $30, 849 CAN where I have assumed $13,650 US per Ph.D. scientist and a monetary conversion value of 1.13 over the 5 years of the grant. The ability to sustain a postdoctoral fellow in the group is reliant on the success of the grant proposal. In the event of an unfavorable proposal review the group will utilize university startup funds dedicated to IceCube-DeepCore activities, $170K CAN, at a size of 1 faculty, 1 Ph.D. student, 1 M.Sc. student. I note increased IceCube support will be sought through a province of Alberta Ingenuity Fund and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) in funding proposals next spring and summer respectively.

Description of planned analysis:

 The Alberta group will focus on analyses involving data from DeepCore. In particular I plan to have two Ph.D. students working on the 5 year dataset analyses for Solar WIMP searches and a precision measurement of q ₂₃ using atmospheric neutrinos. I would like the postdoctoral fellow to work on the potential neutrino hierarchy measurement. Undergraduates in the group will work on analyses involving the ULEE events and the related GRB searches.

Description of Service work

The University of Alberta is home to WestGrid , a very large scale computing infrastructure that is part of the Compute Canada initiative. As new tenure-track faculty a fraction of the nodes will be dedicated to my IceCube activities. I intend to establish WestGrid as a significant IceCube production facility, much as I did with the computing cluster resources at Penn State (PSU). I estimate the following service activity for the local group centered on WestGrid infrastructure and the best case Discovery Grant response:

-  Based on my expertise with IceCube simulation production I estimate establishing IceProd functionality on WestGrid and maintaining the production as 0.3 FTE/year. This would be a responsibility shared by one graduate student and myself. We will participate in traditional IceProd production and filtering as well as continue the role of WIMP signal production and SUSY model production established at PSU.

-  We will continue to maintain and verify the data for the DeepCore SMT3 trigger and the veto-based filter. This will be the responsibility of the second graduate student at an estimated level of 0.15 FTE/year.

-  WestGrid is an ideal grid computing infrastructure for Photonics activities due to the significant number of large memory (256GB/CPU) nodes. I propose the Alberta group take responsibility for the maintenance of IceCube-Photonics interface, that draws on the current efforts by Gary Hill, Nathan Whitehorn and others. This activity includes generation new tables when needed and extending the photospline interpolation development. I estimate this to be a shared effort by the 4 initial group members at Alberta. WestGrid computing resources also has the hardware to continue development and ultimately full reprocessing of IceCube data for the hybrid reconstruction. I estimate these activities to be 0.8 FTE/year for the group.

Other contributions

Work on the potential infill of DeepCore for extending the low energy threshold below 10 GeV is yet to be completed. Pending favorable physics output I plan to submit proposals to NSERC and CFI for the hardware funds for such an infill, approximately 3 strings.

The University of Alberta is the host of the Lake Louise Winter Institute (LLWI). I would welcome the opportunity to utilize the well established organizing committees, of which I will now be a part, to host an IceCube collaboration meeting- at a similar time as the LLWI; possibly February 2011 or 2012.

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