ANTARES Collaboration Home Page
For the full ANTARES information you are referred to the ANTARES Home Page

The ANTARES Telescope

 ANTARES is a neutrino telescope that is being built located  in the Mediterranean Sea, 40 km offshore Toulon in France,  at a depth of 2500 m. ANTARES  is named after the brightest  star  in the constellation Scorpio in the southern hemisphere. The objective of the ANTARES telescope is to study high energy cosmic neutrinos (up to and beyond 1020 eV). The electrically neutral neutrinos can not be deflected by interstellar magnetic fields and interact only very weakly with (interstellar) matter. Hence,  they can travel large distances from their source in the  deep universe and still provide accurate information about the direction in which their source is located.

The study of high energy cosmic neutrinos will improve our understanding of  galactic structures, phenomena like gamma ray bursts and the mechanisms that can accelerate cosmic rays to extreme energies.
Since the energy of the cosmic neutrinos is much larger than energies that can be reached with man-made terrestial accelerators they will give access to physics well beyond the Standard Model.  E.g. the high energy neutrinos could be produced by the annihilation of supersymmetric neutralinos, particles that could constitute dark matter in the universe.

The ANTARES telescope 'looks' downwards to the seabed to avoid background of muons created in the earth atmosphere. Cosmic neutrinos travelling through the earth will occasionally interact with the seabed under the telescope or with the water in and around it and create an electrically charged particle, a muon, which continues almost in the same direction as the neutrino. Such a muon emits Cherenkov light while passing through the seawater. The Antares telescope will detect the light in an array of about 1000 photomultiplier tubes.

Twelve vertical  strings , cables with photomultiplier tubes contained in glass spheres at regular distances,  will be deployed in the sea. They are about 350 m long and their horizontal spacing is about 60 m. The signals of the photomultiplier tubes will be collected on-shore for further analysis.
From the arrival time of the Cherenkov light at the photomultipliers one can reconstruct the direction of the muon, and thus the direction of the neutrino. To measure these times accurately, the clocks of all photomultiplier tubes are synchronized within 0.5 nanosecond.

The ANTARES collaboration consists of about 150  scientists coming from institutes in  France, Italy, The Netherlands, Russia, Spain and United Kingdom. Together they will build the ANTARES telescope, operate, maintain and further extend it. Here you find the list of scientific publications of the ANTARES  collaboration.
The contribution of NIKHEF consists amongst other of the development and implementation of the data acquisition system (the All Data to Shore concept), the event display program,  reconstruction of muon tracks, a directional trigger, software for the search for point sources.

For detailed information see the ANTARES-HOME pages.