European
Exotic super-massive particles in Neutrino Telescopes
European
neutrino
experiments:
ANTARES & KM3NET
Project details: this project( PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0665) is funded by the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation (UEFISCDI) with the contract nr. 32/2011.
Project Summary: Neutrino telescopes are meant to detect neutrinos of cosmic origin through charged current interactions. They are optimized for the Cherenkov light emitted by upward going muons that are most likely produced in muon neutrino interactions in the matter bellow or inside their volume. The large effective areas of these instruments make them suitable to search for rare particles in the penetrating cosmic radiation, as magnetic monopoles (MMs), heavy nuggets of strange quark matter (nuclearites) and Q-balls (supersymmetric stable massive states). Such objects are predicted by many models, and some are cold dark matter candidates. Neutrino telescopes reported searches for relativistic MMs; GUT MMs, nuclearites and Q-balls are too massive to be relativistic, so their detection might be done trough different mechanisms. This project intends to study the physics of the detection of slowly moving exotics in undersea neutrino telescopes: ANTARES and in the future KM3NeT. First, we intend to add to the ANTARES scientific program the search for GUT MMs and Q-balls, implying the models and the simulations of their propagation in water, and the response of the detector in the event of such a particle crossing its volume, and finalize the ongoing nuclearite search. Special trigger strategies will be developed, and implemented in the ANTARES analyses. In the KM3NeT perspective, we intend to adapt the procedures already in use for relativistic monopoles and nuclearites to the SeaTray frame.
The main objective is naturally divided in 3 principal objectives:
Search for GUT magnetic monopoles with the ANTARES neutrino telescope with extension to KM3NeT. The discovery of the GUT MM would have huge impact on physics. It would represent the check of GUT theories, and provide them with the missing parameters concerning GUT MMs their mass and the proton decay catalysis intrinsic cross section. The observation of the MM induced proton decay would be of great significance for particle physics and QCD, while the flux measurement would bring essential information for cosmology (as GUT Mms are strongly correlated with inflation) and the astrophysics of galactic magnetic fields. A negative results, considering that the resulting flux limit will be much lower than the extended Parker bound, would seriously question the validity of GUT theories or our knowledge on the galactic magnetic fields. It could also have significant consequences on the inflation scenarios in cosmology. The existing flux limits make MMs not to be significant candidates for Cold Dark Matter (CDM);
Search for nuclearites with the ANTARES neutrino telescope with extension to KM3NeT. Nuclearites reaching undersea telescopes should be heavier than few 1013 GeV/c2 and are expected to travel in the galaxy with velocities of about 300 km/s. Their discovery will confirm the QCD prediction on the SQM stability, and could complement the expected discovery of nuclear mass nuclearites (“strangelets”) at LHC. The flux and mass spectrum of nuclearites would offer valuable information on the presence of binary strange stars in the galaxy, on the interactions in the intergalactic medium, but also on the nucleosynthesis cosmological phase, and on the CDM composition. It would also offer essential input for the relativistic nuclear physics, on the quark – gluon plasma parameters. A negative result, assuming the discovery of strangelets at colliders, would question our knowledge of massive star physics. A combined negative result (nuclearites and strangelets) would seriously impact on QCD;
Search for Q-balls with the ANTARES neutrino telescope with extension to KM3NeT. Qballs are predicted by some supersymmetric theories, and their existence and stability is demonstrated by a set of them. Their discovery in cosmic rays would be a strong confirmation of supersymmetric scenarios behind the SM, with major implication for particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. A negative result would yield important bounds on those theories;
and 2 secondary objectives:
Investigation of the impact of the project results on physics beyond the Standard Model and cosmology. This objective will ensure the bridging between the ANTARES and KM3NeT activities in the search of SMPs, and other physics related domains. It will allow the tuning of the principal activities in function of the progress in field theory and cosmology, and will ease the exploitation of the obtained results;
Compatibility of the developed software with SeaTray. SeaTray is a software frame, developed in ANTARES by adapting the IceCube IceTray package. It is meant to integrate all simulation and analysis codes in a user friendly package, allowing users to make their research by combining simple scripts and obtaining results in a standard format, easily accessible to other users. This will allow a fast conversion of the software developed for ANTARES in the principal objectives to the KM3NeT conditions.
ANTARES is fully deployed since June 2009, south of Toulon (France) at a depth of 2500 m, and taking data. Our commitment is to keep ANTARES working at least till the next Mediterranean VLVnT (KM3NeT) will be able to take its place, as being the only very large neutrino telescope in the Northern hemisphere (IceCube, is at the South Pole). The first major ANTARES results are going to be published in the next future. KM3NeT will be a 6 km3 instrumented volume neutrino telescope, to be deployed starting 2013 or 2014. It is included in the ESFRI priority list, and among the “7 Magnificent” of the ASPERA roadmap.
Project Team:
Project leader: Dr. V. Popa (CS1)
Members: Dr. L.A. Popa (CS1), G.E. Pavalas (CS3), L. Caramete (CS3)
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Published papers |
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2012 1. J. Aguilar … V. Popa, et al. (ANTARES Coll.), A method for detection of muon induced electromagnetic showers with the ANTARES detector, Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A 675 (2012) 56-62 2. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. (ANTARES Coll.), Search for relativistic magnetic monopoles with the ANTARES neutrino telescope, Astropart. Phys. 35 (2012) 634-640 3. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. (ANTARES Coll.) Measurement of atmospheric neutrino oscillations with the ANTARES neutrino telescope Phys. Lett. B 714 (2012) 224 - 230 4. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.) Measurement of the Group Velocity of Light in Sea Water at the ANTARES Site, Astropart. Phys. 35 (2012) 552-557 5. M. Ageron … V. Popa, et al. (ANTARES Coll.) The ANTARES Telescope Neutrino Alert System Astropart. Phys 35 (2012) 530-536 6. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.) The positioning system of the ANTARES neutrino telescope, J. of Instrumentation 7 (2012) T08002 7. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.), Search for Neutrino Emission from Gamma-Ray Flaring Blazars with the ANTARES Telescope, Astropart. Phys. 36 (2012) 204-210 8. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.), Search for cosmic neutrino point sources with four years of data from the ANTARES telescope, The Astrophysical Journal 760:53 (2012) 10p 2013 9. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.), Detection potential of the KM3NeT detector for high-energy neutrinos from the Fermi Bubbles, Astroparticle Physics, Volume 42, p. 7-14 (2013) 10. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.), A first search for coincident gravitational waves and high energy neutrinos using LIGO, Virgo and ANTARES data from 2007, Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Issue 06, article id. 008, pp. (2013) 11. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.), Search for muon neutrinos from gamma-ray bursts with the ANTARES neutrino telescope using 2008 to 2011 data, Astronomy & Astrophysics, Volume 559, id.A9, 11 pp, 2013 12. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.), Measurement of the atmospheric νμ energy spectrum from 100 GeV to 200 TeV with the ANTARES telescope, The European Physical Journal C, Volume 73, article id.2606, 2013 13. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.), Search for a Correlation between ANTARES Neutrinos and Pierre Auger Observatory UHECRs Arrival Directions, The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 774, Issue 1, article id. 19, 7 pp. (2013) 2014 14. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.), A search for time dependent neutrino emission from microquasars with the ANTARES telescope, Journal of High Energy Astrophysics, Volume 3, p. 9-17 15. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.), Deep sea tests of a prototype of the KM3NeT digital optical module, The European Physical Journal C, Volume 74, article id. #3056, 8 pp 16. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.), Searches for clustering in the time integrated skymap of the ANTARES neutrino telescope, Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Issue 05, article id. 001, pp. (2014) 17. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.), Searches for Point-like and Extended Neutrino Sources Close to the Galactic Center Using the ANTARES Neutrino Telescope, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 786, Issue 1, article id. L5, 5 pp. (2014) 18. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.), A search for neutrino emission from the Fermi bubbles with the ANTARES telescope, The European Physical Journal C, Volume 74, article id.2701 19. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (KM3Net Coll.), Deep sea tests of a prototype of the KM3NeT digital optical module, The European Physical Journal C, Volume 74, article id. #3056, 8 pp. 2015 20. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.), ANTARES constrains a blazar origin of two IceCube PeV neutrino events, Astronomy & Astrophysics, Volume 576, id.L8, 6 pp. 21. S. Adrian-Martinez … V. Popa, et al. . (ANTARES Coll.), Search of dark matter annihilation in the galactic centre using the ANTARES neutrino telescope, Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Issue 10, article id. 068 |
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Public talks at international conferences |
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1. G. E. Pavalas, Search for massive exotic particles with the ANTARES neutrino telescope, 22 European Cosmic Ray Symposium, Moscova 2012. Accepted for publication in J. of Phys. Conf. Series 2. L. A. Popa, Cosmological implications of neutrino mass hierarchy, ORCA Workshop, Catania 2012 3. L.I. Caramete, GUT magnetic monopoles, ANTARES collaboration meeting, Bologna, 2012 4. G. E. Pavalas, Nuclearite searches with ANTARES, Exotic Physics with Neutrino Telescopes, Marsilia, 2013 5. L.I. Caramete, The search for GUT Magnetic Monopols and quantum black holes, Exotic Physics with Neutrino Telescopes, Marsilia, 2013 6. L.I. Caramete, Exotic physics, micro black holes in air, water and ice , ANTARES collaboration meeting, Marsilia, 2013 7. G. Pavalas, Nuclearite analysis, Antares/KM3NeT Collaboration Meeting, Leiden, Olanda, 2014 8. Maarten de Jong, NIKHEF&Leiden University, Netherlands, spokesman of the KM3NeT Consortium, invited talk at the “Lights of the World” international conference, Bucharest 2015 9. G. Pavalas, Exotic phenomenology in the cosmic radiation, public defense of the PhD thesis, a joint PhD between University of Bologna and University of Bucharest, Faculty of Physics, Bucharest 2015 10. G. Pavalas on behalf of the ANTARES Collaboration, Search for nuclearites with the ANTARES neutrino telescope, The 34th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC), The Hague, Netherlands 2015 11. Imad El Bojaddaini, G. Pavalas on behalf of the ANTARES Collaboration, Search for magnetic monopoles with the ANTARES neutrino telescope, The 34th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC), The Hague, Netherlands 2015 |
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Project informations |
Useful links |
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Project Phases: Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4 | Phase 5 | Final Report |
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