Prof. Christian Spiering (DESY Zeuthen)

High energy neutrino astronomy - a glimpse to the promised land

First ideas to build a large underwater neutrino detector started in 1973. After a fourty-year march we now are close to the promised land: IceCube, the cubic kilometer neutrino telescope at the South Pole reports high-energy neutrino events which apparently cannot be explained by interactions of neutrinos generated in the Earth's atmosphere. These observations are opening a third window to the high-energy universe (after charged cosmic rays and gamma rays). The talk gives a short introduction into history, physics goals and functional principles of neutrino telescopes and then focuses to the results obtained during the last 2 years by IceCube. A discussion of future perspectives of the field will conclude the talk.