The Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) was excited to recently host two meetings on the UW–Madison campus. The IceCube Collaboration spring meeting was held from May 2–6 at Union South, and the 2017 IceCube Particle Astrophysics Symposium: Multimessenger Astronomy (IPA 2017) followed, from May 8–10, at Discovery and Union South.
Over 220 members of the international IceCube community attended the collaboration meeting to discuss present and future research in astrophysics and neutrino physics. The spring meeting featured talks from physicists and engineers, which covered the most recent IceCube research results as well as the status of the detector’s maintenance and operations and future improvements. Scheduled plenary sessions also extensively covered the development of next-generation IceCube projects.
Following the collaboration meeting, the IPA Symposium hosted plenaries and parallel sessions with discussion topics that ranged from neutrino astronomy and related cosmic messengers—cosmic rays, gamma rays and gravitational waves—to current research on neutrino properties, both from neutrino detectors such as IceCube and from accelerator-based experiments. Over 140 physicists from around the world convened to discuss major open questions in astrophysics and how current and future experiments can contribute to the answers and perhaps uncover new unknowns.