ANTARES: the first undersea neutrino telescope

The ANTARES Neutrino Telescope was completed in May 2008 and is the first operational Neutrino Telescope in the Mediterranean Sea. The main purpose of the detector is to perform neutrino astronomy and the apparatus also offers facilities for marine and Earth sciences. This paper describes the design, the construction and the installation of the telescope in the deep sea, offshore from Toulon in France. An illustration of the detector performance is given

Tuning parametric models of the atmospheric muon flux in MUPAGE to data from the KM3NeT detector

The muons produced by cosmic ray interactions in the upper atmosphere constitute the most abundant signal for underwater neutrino detectors such as KM3NeT (the Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope), which is currently being deployed in the Mediterranean Sea at two distinct locations. Situated at different depths, the KM3NeT/ARCA and KM3NeT/ORCA detectors experience a different flux of muons, and thus are uniquely positioned to study their evolution and propagation from cosmic ray showers. It is imperative to the main physics goals of the experiment that the atmospheric muon background is modelled correctly, which aids in benchmarking and understanding the detector response to the constant flux of these particles. In this study, the data from the KM3NeT/ORCA detector is used and compared with the Monte Carlo (MC) prediction from the MUPAGE (MUons from PArametric formulas: a fast GEnerator for neutrino telescopes) software package, which generates the energy spectrum, lateral distribution, and muon multiplicity of muon bundles according to a specific parametrisation at different depths below sea level. This parametrisation consists of many free parameters which can be tuned such that simulated physical observables in the detector agree with those measured in data. In this way, improvements to the data-MC agreement are achieved by quantitatively comparing the level of agreement between simulated and measured observables in the KM3NeT detector

First neutrino oscillation measurement in KM3NeT/ORCA

The KM3NeT/ORCA is a next-generation neutrino detector currently under construction in the Mediterranean Sea. There are currently 6 Detection Units deployed, and in the past year the detector has been steadily taking data. Here the first neutrino oscillation measurement is presented using data taken with the ORCA detector 6 Detection Units, containing 354.6 days of exposure. Selection criteria are discussed, followed by a neutrino oscillation analysis. In the analysis it is found that oscillations are preferred with a confidence level of 5.9 σ over “no oscillations”. Likelihood scans of the Δm312 and sin2 θ23 parameter also show a strong exclusion of the no oscillation hypothesis. The sensitivity contour in (sin2 θ23, Δm312) is presented, showing results that are approaching to being being competitive with other experiments [1]

Indirect dark matter searches with neutrinos from the Galactic Centre region with the ANTARES and KM3NeT telescopes

An anomalous flux of neutrinos produced in hypothetical annihilations or decays of dark matter inside a source would produce a signal observable with neutrino telescopes. As suggested by observations, a conspicuous amount of dark matter is believed to accumulate in the centre of our Galaxy, which is in neat visibility for the Mediterranean underwater telescopes ANTARES and KM3NeT. Searches have been conducted with a maximum likelihood method to identify the presence of a dark matter signature in the neutrino flux measured by ANTARES. Results of all-flavour searches for WIMPs with masses from 50 GeV/c2 up to 100 TeV/c2 over the whole operation period from 2007 to 2020 are presented here. Alternative scenarios which propose a dark matter candidate in the heavy sector extensions of the Standard Model would produce a clear signature in the ANTARES telescope, that can exploit its view of the Galactic Centre up to high energies. The presentation of Galactic Centre searches is completed with ongoing analyses and future potential of the KM3NeT telescope, in phased construction in the Mediterranean Sea