The ANTARES Collaboration: contributions to the 31st International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2009), Lodz, Poland, July 2009

TL;DR

The ANTARES neutrino telescope, operational since 2008 in the Mediterranean Sea, aims to detect high-energy astrophysical neutrinos and has presented initial performance results, physics analyses, and sensitivity studies at ICRC 2009.

Contribution

This paper compiles 16 contributions from the ANTARES collaboration, detailing detector performance, preliminary neutrino detection results, and physics analyses including source sensitivity and dark matter searches.

Findings

Detector performance metrics established

Initial neutrino event data collected

Sensitivity to astrophysical sources demonstrated

Abstract

The Antares neutrino telescope, operating at 2.5 km depth in the Mediterranean Sea, 40 km off the Toulon shore, represents the world's largest operational underwater neutrino telescope, optimized for the detection of Cerenkov light produced by neutrino-induced muons. The main goal of Antares is the search of high energy neutrinos from astrophysical point or transient sources. Antares is taking data in its full 12 lines configuration since May 2008: in this paper we collect the 16 contributions by the ANTARES collaboration that were submitted to the 31th International Cosmic Ray Conference ICRC 2009. These contributions includes the detector performances, the first preliminary results on neutrino events and the current physics analysis including the sensitivity to point like sources, the possibility to detect high energy neutrinos in coincidence with GRB, the search for dark matter or exotic particles.