Researchers, postgraduate students and students of the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University are deeply involved into creation and researching activities on the deep-see neutrino telescopes with large volumes.
"The study of astrophysical neutrinos is currently a very promising area of research for many scientific centers working in ultrahigh-energy physics," — the head of the research team in the Faculty of Physics and SINP Associate Professor Evgeny Shirokov said. His group takes part in several large international neutrino projects.
Astrophysical sources of information about distant objects in the Universe may be: primary protons, gamma rays and neutrinos. However, at energies greater than a few TeV photons interact with infrared and microwave background, forming electron-positron pairs. Protons and electrons due to their electric charge are affected by magnetic fields in space and cannot allow us to determine their trajectory from the source to the Earth.
Neutrinos have a very low cross section and provide us information about the distant sources with negligible distortions - their direction remains almost unchanged. It distinguishes neutrinos from other elementary particles as the unique messengers. This fact is one of the most significant differences between neutrino detection and registration of photons and high-energy protons.
A Cherenkov radiation began to be in common use for the detecting ultrahigh-energy neutrinos in the early 90-ies of the last century. The result was a creation of new class of systems large volume deep-see neutrino telescopes.
Since 2005 a scientific group from MSU consisting of collaborators, graduate students and students of the Faculty of Physics and SINP participates in the work for designing, creation and data processing on the large volume neutrino telescopes in such projects as NEMO, ANTARES and KM3Net. In June 2011 the ANTARES collaboration meeting held in Moscow at the Faculty of Physics.
The main efforts of the scientific work conducting by the group are following questions:
Simultaneously the researching group is working on the creation of online Internet portal for neutrino physics.
The latest contributions of the group are published in Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A 656, 11-38 (2011); J. Instrum. 8, P07001 (2013); Eur. Phys. J. C 74, 2701 (2014).