From 21 – 26 October, the first international meeting of the Baikal-GVD collaboration on data analysis and project modelling was held in Prague, at the Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics.

Since 2015, on Lake Baikal, the neutrino telescope with an approximate volume of a cubic kilometre is being constructed. This facility aims at the investigation of cosmic high-energy neutrino fluxes, at the search for hypothetical particles – magnetic monopoles, as well as for candidates for dark matter. For the first time, the idea of neutrino registration by a detector of a cubic kilometre volume located in the natural environment was mentioned by M. A. Markov in 1960.

The Baikal deep underwater neutrino telescope (Baikal-GVD) along with IceCube, ANTARES and KM3NeT is a part of a Global Neutrino Net (GNN), its important constituent in the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth, and can be considered as a first step towards the foundation of the international scientific consortium “Global Neutrino Observatory” (GNO).

The meeting took place in the capital city of the Czech Republic thus highlighting the increasing contribution of the European (Czech, Polish, Slovak) colleagues within the international scientific Baikal-GVD collaboration. The proposal is currently being discussed to name the three of five clusters after the cities, where the scientists, who advance the construction of the neutrino telescope, live: Prague, Cracow and Bratislava. Among thirty participants, there were also representatives of the IceCube, ANTARES and KM3NeT collaborations. 22 presentations and reports were made.

Source: DLNP