How IceCube's Sensor Stream Drops Events and How to Recover Them

IceCube’s photomultiplier tubes produce millions of waveforms each second; a brief network glitch can drop entire events, leaving holes in the neutrino record. When those holes appear in analysis they bias flux measurements and can mimic new physics. This article shows how to detect the loss and recover missing data without redesigning the detector. What you'll learn Why raw sensor streams drop packets under load How to add a resilient buffering layer with Apache Kafka Failure modes to watch for and simple monitoring hooks The detector digitizes each PMT hit into a ~100‑byte waveform and ships