Studies of Acoustic Neutrino Detection Methods with ANTARES

Abstract

The emission of neutrinos within a wide energy range is predicted from very-high-energy phenomena in the Universe. Even the current or next-generation Cherenkov neutrino telescopes might be too small to detect the faint fluxes expected for cosmic neutrinos with energies exceeding the EeV scale. The acoustic detection method is a promising option to enlarge the discovery potential in this highest-energy regime. In a possible future deep-sea detector, the pressure waves produced in a neutrino interaction could be detected by a 100 km\^3-sized array of acoustic sensors, even if it is sparsely instrumented with about 100 sensors/km\^3. This article focuses on the AMADEUS set-up of acoustic sensors, which is an integral part of the ANTARES detector. The main aim of the project is a feasibility study towards a future acoustic neutrino detector. However, the experience gained with the ANTARES-AMADEUS hybrid opto-acoustic set-up can also be transferred to future very large volume optical neutrino telescopes, especially for the position calibration of the detector structures using acoustic sensors.