Every time we have pushed the energy frontier in physics, the Universe has revealed something new. Today, some of the most exciting discoveries arrive from deep space, carried by neutrinos: ghostly particles that pass through planets, stars and our bodies almost without a trace, pointing straight back to the most violent places in the cosmos. In this talk, I will take you on a journey from the South Pole to the Pacific Ocean. We will start at IceCube, a detector built from a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice, whose discovery of high-energy cosmic neutrinos earned Francis Halzen this year's Nobel Prize in Physics. I will share how this bold idea, which I was fortunate to help realize as a young researcher, opened an entirely new window on the Universe and began to reveal where these particles come from. I will then show you how the next chapter is being written right here off the coast of British Columbia. Together with collaborators around the world, we are building the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE), set to become one of the largest neutrino telescopes ever built, more than two kilometres deep in the Pacific. With our first detector line now beginning its life on the seafloor, a new era of discovery is just starting. P-ONE will help pinpoint the sources of the most energetic particles in the Universe and test the laws of physics far beyond the reach of any accelerator on Earth.
Matthias Danninger is a particle and astroparticle physicist, Associate Professor of Physics at Simon Fraser University and Canada Research Chair in Particle Physics. His research spans some of the largest experiments in physics, from the ATLAS experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider to neutrino telescopes deep in the ice and the ocean. Matthias began his career with IceCube at the South Pole. His PhD work at Stockholm University contributed to the first detection of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, which was named Physics World's Breakthrough of the Year in 2013 and honoured with this year's Nobel Prize in Physics to Francis Halzen. At ATLAS, he searches for new long-lived particles beyond the Standard Model. As an ATLAS member, he also shares in the 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Since 2019, he has helped build the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P-ONE) off the coast of British Columbia, and he now serves as the elected spokesperson of the international P-ONE collaboration. His group at SFU designs and builds key detector systems for P-ONE.