ANTARES (telescope)

ANTARES works by its photomultiplier tubes detecting the Cherenkov radiation emitted as the muon passes through the water.

In contrast to the South Pole neutrino telescopes AMANDA and IceCube, ANTARES uses water instead of ice as its Cherenkov medium.

On the other hand, water contains more sources of background light than ice (radioactive isotopes potassium-40 in the sea salt and bioluminescent organisms), leading to a higher energy thresholds for ANTARES with respect to IceCube and making more sophisticated background-suppression methods necessary.

Deployment and connection of the detector were performed in cooperation with the French oceanographic institute, IFREMER using the ROV Victor, and for some earlier operations the submarine Nautile.

Thanks to its location in the Mediterranean Sea, ANTARES is more sensitive to neutrinos with energies below 100 TeV in the southern sky, a region that includes many galactic sources.

Apart from this astro-particle physics aspect, the ANTARES telescope may also tackle some fundamental problems in particle physics, such as the search for dark matter in the form of neutralino annihilation in the Sun (normal solar neutrinos being outside the energy range of ANTARES) or the Galactic Center.

Due to the very different methods employed, its expected sensitivity is complementary to the direct dark matter searches performed by various experiments such as DAMA, CDMS and at the LHC.

[5] In addition to the main optical detector for cosmic neutrinos, the ANTARES experiment also houses a number of instruments for the study of the deep sea environment, such as salinity and oxygen probes, sea current profilers and instrumentation for the measurement of light transmission and sound velocity.

Results from these instruments, while also important for the calibration of the detector, will be shared with ocean science institutes involved in the ANTARES collaboration.