Séminaires
Paschal Coyle (CPPM) : Astroparticle & Oscillations Research with Cosmics in the Abyss (ANTARES & KM3NeT)
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Europe/Paris
1222-RC-08 (LPNHE)
1222-RC-08
LPNHE
Description
Messengers of the infinitely small, neutrinos provide us with valuable insights into the fundamental laws of physics. Messengers of the infinitely large, traveling on cosmological distances, they are privileged probes of cataclysmic astrophysical phenomena.
Neutrino Telescopes, located in the abysses of the Mediterranean Sea comprise a 3D matrix of photomultipliers that detect the Cherenkov light emitted by the charged particles produced when neutrinos interact inside or around the detector.
I will review the landscape of neutrino astronomy, focusing on the first cosmic signal detections recently obtained by IceCube, the constraints placed by ANTARES on its possible origin, and the excellent all-flavour potential of the next generation detector in the Mediterranean (KM3NeT), in particular for the search for neutrino sources in our Galaxy.
I will then discuss the potential of neutrino telescopes for the determination of the neutrino mass ordering through the study of atmospheric neutrinos in the GeV range. Given the importance of this topic and the encouraging results obtained so far, the KM3NeT collaboration has decided to dedicate the French site to this measurement by instrumenting a dense detector named KM3NeT/ORCA with the same technology as adopted for the high energy studies (KM3NeT/ARCA). A first demonstrator of a few detection lines will be deployed in 2016-2017. The full detector could be completed circa 2020, paving the way for the first measurement of the mass ordering.