Skip to main content
Collaboration

ANtartic Impulsive Transient Antenna

ANtartic Impulsive Transient Antenna

The primary objective of the ANtarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) mission is to extend the reach of NASA observatories into the realm of high energy neutrino astronomy to test the fundamental laws of high energy physics and astrophysics. Neutrinos and gravity waves are the only direct astrophysical messengers which reach earth unattenuated through space at all energies. ANITA will probe both the nature of the sources of these extreme particles, and the fundamental interactions of high energy physics at extreme scales.

ANITA, as an Antarctic long-duration balloon flight, observes the Antarctic ice sheet out to a horizon approaching 700 km, giving a neutrino detection volume of near one million cubic kilometers. [Text and image from https://www.phys.hawaii.edu/~anita/]

Visit the collaboration website

Name Role Affiliations Email Phone Office Centers Research topics
Andrew Zeolla Andrew Zeolla Graduate Student Physics avz5228@psu.edu 7138709006 204 Osmond Laboratory CMA Cosmic Rays, Multimessenger Astrophysics, Neutrinos
Name Role Affiliations Email Phone Office Centers Research topics
Kaeli Hughes Kaeli Hughes Postdoc Astronomy, Physics kaeli@psu.edu +1 6142906343 N/A Davey Laboratory CMA Cosmic Rays, Multimessenger Astrophysics, Neutrinos
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.