The KM3NeT project: Towards a km 3-scale neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean Sea

• Main Author: Alexander Kappes
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.212.8182; http://pos.sissa.it/archive/conferences/084/102/EPS-HEP%202009_102.pdf

for the KM3NeT Consortium In recent decades we have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge on our Universe. However, up to now astronomical observations have been restricted to the electromagnetic spectrum. The detection of cosmic high-energy neutrinos ( � 1 TeV) will complement the information from these observations and at the same time provide completely new insights. The low interaction probability, which renders neutrinos perfect cosmic messengers, also poses a large challenge for their detection. Calculations indicate that neutrino telescopes of km 3-scale are necessary to detect neutrino fluxes from Galactic or extra-Galactic objects such as supernova remnants or gamma-ray bursts which are thought to produce neutrinos up to the PeV scale. KM3NeT, which is currently in the design phase, targets to instrument at least one km 3 of deep-sea water in the Mediterranean Sea, its field of view complementing the IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole and exceeding it in sensitivity by a substantial factor. We report on the current status of the KM3NeT project and on possible solutions for the various technical challenges encountered when building an off-shore detector in water depths of several kilometers.