Project DUMAND

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Project DUMAND (Deep Underwater Muon And Neutrino Detector) was a proposed underwater neutrino telescope to be built in the Pacific Ocean, off the shore of Hawaii,^[1] a kilometer beneath the surface. It would have included thousands of strings of instruments occupying a cubic kilometer of the ocean. The proposal called for two types of detectors: optical detectors to find the Cherenkov radiation emitted by protons traveling at more than 75% of the speed of light as a result of collision by neutrinos, and hydrophones to listen for the acoustic signals generated by the fast-moving protons. Sophisticated signal processing would have combined the signals from many optical and acoustic sensors, allowing scientists to determine the direction from which the neutrino arrived, and to rule out false signals arising from other particles or acoustic sources. Because of the nature of the interaction between the neutrino and the proton, Project DUMAND would have been most sensitive to ultra-high energy neutrinos, and completely insensitive to solar neutrinos.

Although it was never completed, Project Dumand was in a sense a precursor of the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array, or AMANDA, and the water cherenkov neutrino telescopes in the Mediterranean, ANTARES, NEMO and NESTOR