Jenni Adams is New Zealand's lead scientist in the IceCube collaboration, whose observatory consists of 5000 sensors distributed over a cubic kilometre under the Antarctic ice at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. The sensors detect Cerenkov radiation from the decay products of very high energy neutrinos interacting with nuclei in the ice. In the past decade this research has led to notable firsts, including: (i) the first discovery of neutrinos with energies 100 times greater than particles in the Large Hadron Collider; (ii) the unambiguous association of neutrino events with gamma-ray flares in active galactic nuclei known as "blazars". The significance of the first result is that the energies involved require processes beyond stellar nuclear physics, at vast cosmological distances. The significance of the second result is that it sheds a unique understanding on the physics of accretion disks and jets around the supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies.
