Date: Tuesday 13th November 2001
Title: ANTARES: A Neutrino Telescope in the Mediterranean Sea
Speaker: Dr. John Carr (CPPM Marseille)
Abstract
Observing the Universe using the weakly interacting neutrino as a
"messenger" is an old idea. The ANTARES Collaboration was formed
in 1996 with the objective of building a deep-sea neutrino telescope.
A neutrino telescope is currently operating in the ice at the South
Ploe, but attempts to build a large-scale in the sea have not been
successful. ANTARES benefits from advances in marine technology
developed for the oil industry and from close collaboration with
oceanographic institutes in order to overcome the difficulties
experienced by previous projects.
The talk will discuss the rich scientific potential of the ANTARES
project in the fields of astronomy, cosmic ray physics, particle
physics as well as marine biology and oceanography. The first phase of
the project has been to acquire the technology and experience
necessary to construct such an instrument. A major aspect of this
stage of the project was the choice and evaluation of the site which will
be 40km south of Toulon in France. With the successful completion
of this first stage, the collaboration has moved on to the construction
of a detector of sufficient size to start to observe neutrino events
from outer space: a detector woth an effective area of 0.1km^2. The
detector will be a further step towards the ultimate goal of the
construction of a neutrino telescope with volume 1km^3 in the northern
hemisphere which would give complementary coverage to the south pole
project and in addition enable the observation of the centre of our
own galaxy.