ANTARES proposal: Towards a large scale high energy cosmic neutrino undersea detector

Abstract

The ANTARES collaboration propose to observe high energy cosmic neutrinos using a deep sea Cherenkov detector. The sky survey with high energy neutrinos is complementary to the observations with photons and will shed a new light on the understanding of the origin of cosmics rays. We propose to explore the possibility of a km-scale detector to be installed in a deep site in the Mediterranean sea, for which a broad collaboration will be needed. With the help of collaborators and partners which have experience in sea science engineering (COM, CSTN, CTME, IFREMER, France Télécom Câbles, INSU-CNRS...) we will test the sea engineering part of a detector including test deployments close to the Toulon coast (France) where technical support is available and where several sites at depths down to 2500~m are easily accessible. We propose to build and install a demonstrator (a fully equipped 3-dimensional test array) the design of which can be extended to a km-scale detector. During the same time, autonomous systems allowing to measure undersea optical parameters in view of the selection of a site for the future km-scale detector will be realized