ANTARES - پروژه "تحقیق و توسعه" برای یک ردیاب چندمنظوره

Over the last three years, the ANTARES collaboration had an intensive R&D activity for the construction of a deep-sea neutrino telescope. The site, the procedures and the performances of the proposed detector were evaluated. The deployment and the underwater electrical connections were tested successfully at 2400 m depth, in the Mediterranean Sea, near Toulon, in the proposed site for the first phase of the project. This phase consists in the deployment of a detector with an effective area of about 0.1 km2 by 2002.

In 1996, a collaboration of particle physicists, astrophysicists and experts in marine technology was formed to build a deep sea neutrino telescope. A first phase of R&D finished in 1999, when the construction of a detector with an effective area of about 0.1 km 2 was approved. The ANTARES scientific program [1] reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the collaboration. The main motivation comes from neutrino astronomy, since the detection of the cosmic neutrinos would lead to a better understanding of several astrophysical environments, from the supposed accelerators of the UHE cosmic rays, to high density regions, opaques to photons (astrophysical beam-dumps). The neutrinos would result from the charged pions produced by the interaction of accelerated protons with matter (pp) or radiation (p-y). Candidate sources of high energy neutrinos include X-ray binaries and supernova remnants, active galactic nuclei (AGN) and gammaray bursters (GRB).