Thermonuclear burn-up in deuterated methane CD4CD_4

The thermonuclear burn-up of highly compressed deuterated methane CD$_4$ is considered in the spherical geometry. The minimal required values of the burn-up parameter $x = \rho_0 \cdot r_f$ are determined for various temperatures $T$ and densities $\rho_0$. It is shown that thermonuclear burn-up in $CD_4$ becomes possible in practice if its initial density $\rho_0$ exceeds $\approx 5 \cdot 10^3$ $g \cdot cm^{-3}$. Burn-up in CD$_2$T$_2$ methane requires significantly ($\approx$ 100 times) lower compressions. The developed approach can be used in order to compute the critical burn-up parameters in an arbitrary deuterium containing fuel

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