Exotic super-massive particles in Neutrino Telescopes

 European

neutrino

experiments:

ANTARES & KM3NET

Summary: The goal of this project is to define, develop and implement the search for super-massive, Slowly Moving exotic Particles (SMPs) as GUT magnetic monopoles (MMs), nuclearites and Q-balls with very large volume neutrino telescopes (VLVnT): ANTARES in present and KM3NeT in the future.

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.