The South Pole Acoustic Test Setup (SPATS)

New detection techniques for (GZK) neutrinos are required for instrumenting a large detector volume needed to observe the low neutrino fluxes at the EeV energy range. Studies on a larger IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole have been intensively investigated in the last decade. A larger effective volume at a reasonable cost is possible if an acoustic array is a part of a large hybrid detector which includes radio and the existing optical array. The feasibility and the physics capabilities of an acoustic array at the South Pole depend on the knowledge of the acoustic properties of the ice such as the sound speed, the attenuation length, the background noise level and the transient rate. To investigate the ice properties, the first three acoustic strings of the South Pole Acoustic Test Setup (SPATS) have been deployed in the austral summer 2006/2007, then completed with an additional string in 2007/2008. With its four strings SPATS was able to evaluate in situ the acoustic properties of the South Pole ice in the 10–100 kHz frequency range. In this paper the performance of SPATS is described, results on the acoustic ice properties are presented and a new drilling method to deploy acoustic strings in ice is introduced.