News Archive 2014 / 2015

 

  • First string of KM3NeT deployed

    At 3 December scientists and engineers of KM3NeT formally started the construction of the KM3NeT neutrino telescope. The time of prototyping and building demonstrators came to an end with the installation of the first full 700 m tall detection unit at the KM3NeT-Italy site just south of Sicily, Italy.

     

  • MANTS Meeting

    The yearly MANTS meeting of the Antares, Baikal, IceCube and KM3NeT collaborations will be held at Oct 17/18 in Amsterdam.

     

  • VLVNT Workshop 2015

    From Sept 14 to Sept 16, the 7th edition of the International Workshop on Very Large Volume Neutrino Telescopes will be held at the Physics Department of University "La Sapienza" in Roma.
    First Bulletin
     

  • GNN Dissertation Prize 2015:   

    In June 2015, the Dissertation Prize of the Global Neutrino Network has been awarded to three former graduate students (in alphabetic order):

    - Tri Astraatmadja (Nikhef, Amsterdam) for his thesis “Starlight between the waves:In search of TeV photon emission from Gamma-Ray Bursts with the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope”

    - Jakob van Santen (University of Wisconsin, Madison) for his thesis “Neutrino Interactions in IceCube above 1 TeV: Constraints on Atmospheric Charmed-Meson Production and Investigation of the Astrophysical Neutrino Flux with 2 Years of IceCube Data taken 2010-2012”

    - Juan Pablo Yáñez (DESY, Zeuthen) for his thesis “Measurement of neutrino oscillations in atmospheric neutrinos with the IceCube DeepCore detector”

    This is the first year that the GNN Dissertation Prize is awarded.  It recognizes young postdoctoral candidates who have written an outstanding thesis and contributed significantly to the project.  Primary criteria of the selection are the scientific quality, the didactics and the form of the thesis. The Prize consist of a certificate, a gratification of 300 Euro and a specially designed gift with the name of the winner and a sign "2015 GNN Dissertation Prize".

    Juan Pablo Yáñez has analyzed atmospheric neutrino events taken with DeepCore, the dense inner part of IceCube. Based on data taken over three years, he derived constraints on oscillation parameters (sin²theta23 and delta m23²) which are comparable to those of Super-K. He thereby demonstrated for the first time that a sparsely instrumented Cherenkov detector in a natural target medium can become a competitive player in precision oscillation physics. This is a result which three years ago one would have considered only in the most optimistic dreams.  A paper with the results has been published in Phys. Rev. D 91, 072004 (2015) (see also arXiv:1410.7227).

    Jakob van Santen has analyzed the energy spectrum and angular distribution of neutrinos that interacted inside the instrumented volume of the IceCube detector. The analysis extended the former results on “starting events” down to 1 TeV  a factor 30 lower than previous analyses.  The work provided new information about the energy spectrum of the recently discovered astrophysical neutrino flux as well as the maximum contribution to the neutrino flux from the prompt decays of charmed mesons produced in air showers. A paper with the  results has been published in Physical Review D 91, 022001 (2105) (see also arXiv:1410.1749).

    Tri Astraamadja has focused on the ANTARES telescope operated as a gamma-ray telescope. This is possible by searching for down-going muons produced in interactions of gamma rays in the Earth’s atmosphere. Tri focused to the short time windows when satellite experiments had announced a Gamma Ray Burst. For ANTARES data, only upper limit could be derived. However, the sophisticated tools developed in this work will make it possible that the much bigger KM3NeT detector could detect gamma rays from a GRB with a significance of three standard deviations. Part of the thesis has been published in MNRAS, 418, 1774 (2011).

    The 3 theses are available at
    Van Santen
    Yanez
    Astraatmadja
     

  • First cluster of Baikal GVD completed

    In early April 2015, scientists of the Baikal collaboration deployed and launched” the first cluster of the Gigaton Volume Detector (Baikal-GVD). The first cluster was christened “Dubna”. It comprises 192 optical modules. The modules are arranged at depths down to 1,300 m. Over its next stages of evolution, the telescope will be stepwise extended by deploying new clusters. By 2020, it is planned to consist of 10-12 clusters with a total volume of about 0.4 cubic kilometers (GVD phase-1).

     

  • 28.2.1014: MANTS-GNN Meeting 2014                                                                                                                            
    The MANTS GNN meeting will take place at September 20/21 in Geneva http://dpnc.unige.ch/mants_gnn2014/index.html

 

  • 24.2.2014: Dark Ghosts                                                                                                                                      
    The first GNN Workshop on Indirect Dark Matter Searches with Neutrino Telescopes  is announced to take place at April 10/11 in Valencia:                                    
    http://indico.ific.uv.es/indico/internalPage.py?pageId=1&confId=2103

 

  • 23.2.2014: Start of the 2014 Baikal expedition     
    At February 23, 2014, the yearly deployment activities at Lake Baikal have started. Accidentally, this is exactly 27 years after neutrinos from Supernova 1987A have been registered. Together with a series of technology tests towards the large detector GVD, a fourth string with 24 optical modules will be added to the present 3-string configuration. GVD (Stage 1) will be configured from 12 clusters, each cluster consisting of 8 strings. 

 

  • 21.2.2014: Nathan Whitehorn named "Young  Star"                                                   
    Nathan Whitehorn from University Wisconsin was named "Young Star" of the Division of Astrophysics of the American Physics  Society for his outstanding contributions to the IceCube project. For details see http://www.news.wisc.edu/22580