"Hunting neutrinos in the Deep Sea" by Dorothea Samtleben (Nikhef)
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Europe/Amsterdam
Nikhef
Nikhef
Description
Neutrinos are abundant, but notoriously hard to detect. They are still highly sought after as e.g. measurements of their flavour oscillations are a promising path to possibly discover new physics.
Also very recently they prominently entered the stage in multi-messenger astronomy with the first identification of a cosmic high energy neutrino source, opening a new window to explore the distant Universe.
The Netherlands are deeply involved in the KM3NeT collaboration, constructing a detector on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea to enable highly sensitive neutrino observations. These will provide access to cosmic high energy neutrinos as well as to the lower energy neutrinos created in interactions of cosmic rays with the atmosphere, which allow the measurement of neutrino oscillations at high precision and with this also the determination of the neutrino mass ordering.
I will present the status of the detector, data from the first strings in the Mediterranean Sea and an overview on the science potential of KM3NeT.
