The Antares And Km3Net Neutrino Telescopes: Status And Outlook For Acoustic Studies

Véronique Van Elewyck

doi:10.1051/epjconf/201921601004

Abstract

The ANTARES detector has been operating continuously since 2007 in the Mediterranean Sea, demonstrating the feasibility of an undersea neutrino telescope. Its superior angular resolution in the reconstruction of neutrino events of all flavors results in unprecedented sensitivity for neutrino source searches in the southern sky at TeV energies, so that valuable constraints can be set on the origin of the cosmic neutrino flux discovered by theIceCube detector. The next generation KM3NeT neutrino telescope is now under construction, featuring two detectors with the same technology but different granularity: ARCA designed to search for high energy (TeV-PeV) cosmic neutrinos and ORCA designed to study atmospheric neutrino oscillations at the GeV scale, focusing on the determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy. Both detectors use acoustic devices for positioning calibration, and provide testbeds for acoustic neutrino detection.

Highlights

Neutrinos have long been proposed as a complementary probe to cosmic rays and photons to explore the high-energy (HE) sky, as they can emerge from dense media and travel across cosmological distances without being deflected by magnetic fields nor absorbed by inter- and intra-galactic matter and radiation
Since the first observation of HE neutrinos of astrophysical origin in the IceCube telescope [1] in 2013, neutrino astronomy has established itself as part of the "multimessenger paradigm" for the study of astrophysical sources, along with gravitational waves
Neutrino telescopes installed in the Mediterranean Sea play a major role in complementing IceCube dataset and sky coverage, while benefiting from the optical properties of seawater to achieve unprecedented pointing and reconstruction performances

Summary

Introduction

Neutrinos have long been proposed as a complementary probe to cosmic rays and photons to explore the high-energy (HE) sky, as they can emerge from dense media and travel across cosmological distances without being deflected by magnetic fields nor absorbed by inter- and intra-galactic matter and radiation. The unambiguous identification of cosmic neutrino sources requires larger data samples, coupled with improved angular resolution and a full sky coverage of neutrino telescopes In this context, neutrino telescopes installed in the Mediterranean Sea play a major role in complementing IceCube dataset and sky coverage, while benefiting from the optical properties of seawater to achieve unprecedented pointing and reconstruction performances. Neutrino telescopes installed in the Mediterranean Sea play a major role in complementing IceCube dataset and sky coverage, while benefiting from the optical properties of seawater to achieve unprecedented pointing and reconstruction performances This contribution presents the status of the currently operating detector ANTARES, along with its main scientific contributions, and describes the next-generation detector KM3NeT, under construction off the French and Italian coasts. As of special interest for this conference, a short description of the acoustic instrumentation implemented in ANTARES and KM3NeT, and its possible use for neutrino detection, will be provided as well

ANTARES status and main results

KM3NeT: the next-generation neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean

Findings

Acoustic studies with Mediterranean neutrino telescopes