Observing the birth of supermassive black holes with the planned ICECUBE neutrino detector

It has been suggested that the supermassive black holes, at the centers of galaxies and quasars, may initially form in single collapses of relativistic star clusters or supermassive stars built up during the evolution of dense star clusters. We show that it may be possible for ICECUBE (a planned 1 km3 neutrino detector in Antarctica) to detect the neutrino bursts associated with those collapses at redshift z ≲ 0.2 with a rate of ∼0.1-1 burst per year. Such detections could give new insights into the formation of structure in the Universe, especially when correlated with gravitational wave signatures or even gamma-ray bursts. © 1998 The American Physical Society