Baikal-GVD: status and prospects

Baikal-GVD is a next generation, kilometer-scale neutrino telescope under construction in Lake Baikal. It is designed to detect astrophysical neutrino fluxes at energies from a few TeV up to 100 PeV. GVD is formed by multi-megaton subarrays (clusters). The array construction started in 2015 by deployment of a reduced-size demonstration cluster named "Dubna". The first cluster in its baseline configuration was deployed in 2016, the second in 2017 and the third in 2018. The full scale GVD will be an array of ~10000 light sensors with an instrumented volume of about 2 cubic km. The first phase (GVD-1) is planned to be completed by 2020-2021. It will comprise 8 clusters with 2304 light sensors in total. We describe the design of Baikal-GVD and present selected results obtained in 2015-2017.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures. Conference proceedings for QUARKS201

BAIKAL experiment: status report

We review the present status of the Baikal Neutrino Project and present the results obtained with the deep underwater neutrino telescope NT-200.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. Presented at TAUP 2001 (7th international workshop on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics), Sep. 2001, Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, Assergi, Ital

Lifshitz formula for the Casimir force and the Gelfand-Yaglom theorem

We provide a Quantum Field Theory derivation of Lifshitz formula for the Casimir force due to a fluctuating real scalar field in $d+1$ dimensions. The field is coupled to two imperfect, thick, plane mirrors, which are modeled by background potentials localized on their positions. The derivation proceeds from the calculation of the vacuum energy in the Euclidean version of the system, reducing the problem to the evaluation of a functional determinant. The latter is written, via Gelfand-Yaglom's formula, in terms of functions depending on the structure of the potential describing each mirror; those functions encode the properties which are relevant to the Casimir force and are the reflection coefficients evaluated at imaginary frequencies.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figur