Global Neutrino Network founded!
21 November 2013
After signing the MoU on GNN: From left to right Christian Spiering (DESY, Zeuthen), Maarten de Jong (Nikhef, Amsterdam) Tyce deYoung (PennState Univ., University College), Zhan-Arys Dzhilkibaev (INR, Moscow), Juan-José Hernandez-Rey (Univ. Valencia), Paschal Coyle (CPPM, Marseille), Olga Botner (Univ. Uppsala), Uli Katz (Univ. Erlangen).
The idea to closer link the neutrino telescope projects underwater and in ice has been discussed in the international community of high-energy neutrino astrophysicists for several years. Finally, at October 15 of this year, representatives of the collaborations ANTARES, BAIKAL, IceCube and KM3NeT signed a Memorandum of Understanding on a Global Neutrino Network (GNN). The signature act (see picture) was part of the annual common meeting of all four collaborations, this time in Munich.
GNN aims for a closer collaboration and a more coherent strategy among the neutrino telescope communities and for exploitation of the resulting synergistic effects. It will serve as a forum for formalizing and further developing the present annual Mediterranean-Antarctic Neutrino Telescope Symposium (MANTS) meetings and biannual international workshop on Very Large Volume Neutrino Telescopes (VLVNT).
Goal of GNN include the coordination of alert and multi-messenger policies, exchange and mutual checks of software, creation of a common software pool, establishing a common legacy of public documents, developing standards for data representation, cross-checks of results with different systematics, the organization of schools, and other forms of exchanging expertise, e.g. through mutual working visits of scientists and engineers or by forming ad-hoc advisory committees of members of the four participating collaborations.
No doubt, the recent evidence for extraterrestrial neutrinos by IceCube gave wings to GNN and encourages KM3NeT (Mediterranean Sea) and GVD (Lake Baikal) to focus their efforts towards a first Northern cubic kilometre detector and to ask for appropriate funding. At the same time, also IceCube considers extension of its present configuration. Once the Northern projects KM3NeT will have evolved to a comparable scale as IceCube, GNN might be even develop into a more formal consortium, tentatively christened GNO (Global Neutrino Observatory).