Russian Scientists Launch Deep-Sea Neutrino Telescope Into Lake Baikal

The Dubna cluster comprises 192 optical modules which are immersed at a depth of up to 1,300 meters. It is one of the three largest neutrino detectors in the world.

A team of scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow), the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna), Moscow State University, and other scientific institutions set up and put into operation a unique experiment facility – the Dubna deep-sea multimegaton neutrino telescope – at the bottom of Lake Baikal.

The Dubna complex is the first cluster of the Baikal-GVD (Gigaton Volume Detector) cubic-kilometer-scale neutrino telescope which is currently being built.

The detector is aimed at demonstrating and studying high-energy neutrinos. There is a possibility that neutrinos – after piercing through Earth – would spark some particle interaction and generate a cascade of charged particles. The Cherenkov radiation emitted by those particles propagates in Lake Baikal’s water. Thus, it can be registered with the optical modules of the detector.

The next stage of the project is the gradual enlargement of the telescope’s volume through the creation of new clusters.

By 2020, a new 0.5-cubic-kilometer detector comprising 10-12 clusters is planned to become operational. It is expected to be comparable in volume to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the largest neutrino telescope in the world.

Detecting high-energy neutrino flows in Lake Baikal will give scientists an understanding of high-energy processes in remote astrophysical objects.

It will also help discover the origins of particles of the highest energy ever registered, examine the characteristics of those particles and shed more light on the evolution of the Universe.