Cherenkov Neutrino Telescopes: Recent Progress and Next Steps

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent progress in Cherenkov neutrino telescopes, discussing their design, scientific goals, and role in multimessenger astronomy, with a focus on understanding cosmic rays and energetic cosmic phenomena.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current Cherenkov neutrino telescope developments, highlighting recent advancements, challenges, and future directions in high-energy astrophysics research.

Findings

Neutrino telescopes are crucial for studying cosmic accelerators.

Design strategies vary across different media and environments.

Cherenkov neutrino detection advances enable new insights into the high-energy universe.

Abstract

Neutrino telescopes provide a unique observational gateway to the high-energy universe, enabling the study of cosmic accelerators and extreme environments that remain inaccessible to the other high-energy messengers. Although they share core detection principles with neutrino experiments in particle physics, such as the observation of Cherenkov radiation, their scientific objectives and operational constraints diverge markedly. This paper reviews the motivations behind astrophysical neutrino detection, outlines key design strategies across various media and deployment environments, and highlights the critical role of neutrino telescopes in the context of multimessenger astronomy. In particular, we emphasize their potential to illuminate the origins of cosmic rays and to probe the mechanisms driving the most energetic phenomena in the universe.