Them neutrinos are shy critters. Given half a chance, they’ll pass on by without ya’ll ever knowin they bin there.

But when it comes to water, they lurv a lil splashin and a-playin. With a microphone, ya’ll can even hear ’em. Yep, that’s right. On the rare occasions they do interact with matter, they generate a cascade of particles that create a detectable sound wave.

But a lot of other things like water too, such as fish and humans. And they’re so noisy that they drown out the lil bitty splashin that neutrinos make. Which is why attempts to listen out for neutrinos have so far come to nothin.

But if ya wanna lil bit of peace and quiet, try the South Pole. Earlier this year, them particle people dug a few holes in the ice down there, filled ’em with microphones and started a-listenin out.

Now the first test results are back, says Justin Vandenbroucke, aka the Buddha of Berkeley. Turns out it is much quieter in the ice than in water (even though the wind does its best to drum up some sounds near the surface.) That’s the good news. The bad news is that sound don’t seem to travel in Antarctic ice as well ya’ll had hoped.

The eventual plan is to search for neutrinos by lookin for their splashin, their flashin and their radio transmishin. But them particle people got a whole lot more work to do before they can combine these methods in a giant detector beneath the ice. And most of that work is in findin out whether acoustic detection is really viable.

So ya’ll come back now and ah’ll letcha know how Buddha boy gets on.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0708.2089: Feasibility of Acoustic Neutrino Detection in Ice: First Results from the South Pole Acoustic Test Setup (SPATS)