KM3NeT

KM3NeT, an acronym for Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope, is a future European research infrastructure which will be located at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. It will host the next generation neutrino telescope in the form of a water Cherenkov detector with an instrumented volume of more than five cubic kilometre.

KM3NeT will search for neutrinos from distant astrophysical sources like supernova remnants, gamma-ray bursts, supernovae or colliding stars and will be a powerful tool in the search for dark matter in the universe. An array of tenthousands of optical sensors will detect the faint light in the deep sea from charged particles originating from collisions of the neutrinos and the Earth. The facility will also house instrumentation for other sciences like marine biology, oceanography and geophysics for long term and on-line monitoring of the deep sea environment and the sea bottom at depth of several kilometres.

In 2010, a design study of the infrastructure was concluded with a Technical Design Report, which was made public in 2011. It is anticipated that the neutrino telescope will contain in the order of 12000 pressure resistant glass spheres attached to about 300 detection units with a height of almost one kilometer. Each glass sphere will contain 31 photomultiplier tubes and will be connected to shore via a high-bandwidth optical network. At the shore, a farm of computers will perform the first data filter in the search for the signal of cosmic neutrinos.

For the design of the neutrino detector, KM3NeT builds on the experience of three pilot projects in the Mediterranean Sea: the ANTARES detector, the NEMO experiment and the NESTOR Project. ANTARES was completed on 30 May 2008, and is the largest neutrino telescope in the northern hemisphere.

In the southern hemisphere, at Antarctica, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has recently been completed. Together, IceCube and KM3NeT will view the full sky and form a global neutrino observatory.

References

• KM3NeT Homepage