Neutrino astronomy is one of the main research areas at ECAP. The institute is a member of the ANTARES collaboration that operates a large Cherenkov detector installed at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. This detector is optimised for the detection of muons produced in the interaction of high-energy neutrinos. Due to the excellent timing resolution of the telescope and its precise position calibration, the direction of the muon track and hence of the neutrino source can be reconstructed with sub-degree accuracy at neutrino energies of some TeV or above. The main scientific objective of the collaboration is to reveal the origins and acceleration mechanisms of high-energy cosmic rays using neutrinos as messenger particles. The ANTARES Collaboration pursues a broad range of physics goals, such as searches for neutrino point sources, non-baryonic dark matter or flavour oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos. More information on neutrino astronomy and the ANTARES neutrino telescope can be found on the ANTARES homepage.
The ANTARES infastructure also offers opportunities for the development of new particle detection techniques. The ECAP group is leading the AMADEUS project, investigating the feasibility of acoustic neutrino detection.
The neutrino astronomy group of ECAP also is a key component of the KM3NeT collaboration, aiming at a future European deep-sea research infrastructure in the Mediterranean Sea that will host a neutrino telescope with a volume of several cubic kilometres.
The following fields of activity are pursued by the neutrino astronomy group of ECAP