Installation does not harm the environment
The largest deep-sea neutrino telescope in the Northern Hemisphere, built at the bottom of Lake Baikal, was commissioned today. The launch of the Baikal Deep-Sea Neutrino Telescope (international name – Baikal Gigaton Volume Detector or Baikal-GVD) was carried out by the Minister of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation Valery Falkov.
The largest neutrino telescope in the Northern Hemisphere launched at Lake Baikal
The construction of this scientific facility has been underway since 2015. Its main tasks are called the detection of sources of ultrahigh energy neutrinos, the study of the evolution of galaxies and the Universe.
The co-executors of the Baikal-GVD project include the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Irkutsk State University, Nizhny Novgorod State Technical University. The project participants are the Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics of the Czech Technical University (Czech Republic), the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of the Comenius University (Slovakia), EvoLogis Gmbh (Germany), Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland).
Minister of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation Valery Falkov and Director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research Grigory Trubnikov signed a memorandum on the joint development of the project. The document confirms joint intentions to support existing and create new large physics experimental facilities, as well as strengthening international scientific and technical cooperation. In addition, it provides for JINR and INR RAS to conduct fundamental research on natural fluxes of high-energy muons and neutrinos, search for magnetic monopoles and dark matter particles in experiments on the Baikal-GVD telescope with the participation of foreign scientists. In fact, the memorandum defines the target program and the main architecture for the development of the Baikal neutrino telescope for the next one and a half to two decades.
It is no coincidence that Lake Baikal was chosen to host the telescope. The unique transparency of the local water makes it possible to determine the direction of neutrinos with the best accuracy. At the same time, a large depth is important to protect the facility from the light left behind by atmospheric muons. In addition, it is convenient that during February and March the lake is covered with strong ice, which allows assembling elements of a deep-sea telescope from ice in winter, simplifying the installation of new detectors.
The ministry said the installation does not harm the environment.
