Abstract
The exploration of deep sea environments is presently at the dawn of a new era: underwater laboratories, permanently installed on the sea floor and offering power and on-line data transmission links to the shore, will allow to continuously monitor oceanographical properties. An important boost in this direction has been provided by the high energy physics scientific community, that aims at the realization of an underwater detector for cosmic high energy neutrinos. Neutrinos are considered a very promising probe for high energy astrophysics and many indications suggest that some of the most energetic sources known in the universe could also be high energy neutrino sources. The expected neutrino fluxes indicate that a km3-scale detector must be realised to achieve this ambitious aim. The quest for the realization of such a detector in the Mediterranean Sea has already started.
Highlights
Ocean depths represent today a new frontier for the exploration of the Earth
Its lifetime spans almost two decades from the small initial NT-36 detector, that has proven the capability of the experiment to search for neutrinos by the detection of first neutrino candidates (Balkanov et al, 1999, 2000), to the present neutrino telescope NT200, which was put into operation in 1998
The AMANDA data have permitted to measure for the first time the upgoing atmospheric neutrino spectrum in the energy range from few TeV to 300 TeV, proving the capabilities of the Cherenkov detection technique and allowing to set what is up to now the most restrictive experimental bound on the diffuse high energy neutrino flux (Ahrens et al, 2003; Ackermann et al, 2005a)
Summary
Ocean depths represent today a new frontier for the exploration of the Earth. The study of these vast regions is a scientific and technological challenge that has been undertaken by scientists of various disciplines. The proposed detector could be realized by setting up a lattice of optical sensors able to detect the faint light produced by the passage of these particles through the water. These apparatuses could detect the most elusive known particle, the neutrino, and open the new field of neutrino astronomy
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