ANTARES, a permanent deep undersea observatory for high energy cosmic neutrino detection

ANTARES is a research and development project studying the feasibility of building and deploying a large undersea high energy neutrino telescope aimed at the observation of galactic and extra-galactic sources. A scalable detector prototype, consisting of at least two mooring lines equipped with large photomultipliers, connected to a shore station by an electro-optical cable, is currently under study. This demonstrator, which should be installed at a depth of 2300 m off the coast of Toulon (France) by the end of 1999, will be the starting point of a km/sup 2/ detector in the forthcoming years. The ANTARES Collaboration is concurrently building and testing autonomous systems in order to measure undersea optical parameters in view of the selection of a site for this future km-scale high energy neutrino telescope.