On Thursday, 2 March, the first detection line of the ANTARES neutrino telescope, which lies 2,500 metres below the surface of the sea, was connected to the shore station in La Seyne-sur-Mer by a remote-controlled robot. A few hours later, ANTARES looked up at the sky for the first time and caught sight of its first muons.
This connection marks the arrival of the ANTARES detector, the first deep-sea, high-energy neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean. The event rewards ten years of combined efforts by some 200 technicians, engineers and scientists from twenty laboratories (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands and Russia).
ANTARES is located about 30 kilometres off the French coast near Toulon. The detector when completed will consist of 12 vertical strings supporting 900 photomultipliers in total. The measurement of the Cerenkov light emitted by muons produced in muon-neutrino interactions in water and under-sea rock will allow the reconstruction of the neutrino direction with an accuracy of 0.3 degree above 10 TeV, thus justifying the term ‘neutrino astronomy’.
|
