Last week marked the beginning of the annual expedition to build the Baikal-GVD Neutrino Telescope at Lake Baikal. The abnormally warm autumn and winter in Siberia resulted in ice being thin and heavily cracked at the time the expedition started due to the great diurnal temperature variation. Consequently, heavy wheeled vehicles can not travel on it for safety reasons. The camp was set up on ice, but not fully: the 14th cluster is being installed, the 1st and the 13th are undergoing modernisation and repairs.

Photos by Bair Shaibonov

The equipment is delivered in all ways possible in the current conditions: by railway vehicles, hovercraft, and snowmobile.

Today, the underwater structure of the facility counts 13 clusters and 4,100 optical modules. Employees of the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems at JINR assembled about 660 optical modules for the deployment of the neutrino telescope’s clusters in 2025. During the expedition, a new cluster and two intercluster strings are planned to be installed. It is not possible to implement plans on installing the submarine cable line and the second cluster during this expedition.

Baikal-GVD is one of the three active neutrino telescopes in the world and, along with the IceCube Telescope at the South Pole and KM3NeT in the Mediterranean Sea, is part of the Global Neutrino Network. The Baikal-GVD Neutrino Relescope is being built by an international collaboration led by the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research.

In 2024, the Baikal Telescope detected astrophysical neutrinos with energies exceeding 200 TeV. This allowed scientists to conclude that the galactic disk of the Milky Way produces a much larger number of high energy neutrinos than previously thought.