Km³ Cherenkov Telescopes for High Energy Neutrino Astronomy

Abstract

The only neutrinos ever detected from cosmos are the neutrinos from the supernova SN1987A and the Solar neutrinos. Indeed, up to know no significant excess of high energy neutrinos has been found to stem over the atmospheric neutrino background produced by the interaction of cosmic rays in the atmosphere that surrounds the Earth. The physics that can be addressed with high energy neutrino telescopes covers a very broad range of items, spanning from Dark Matter to Ultra High Energy Particle (UHECR) production. However, motivations for high energy neutrino astronomy and consequently for the construction of km³-scale Cherenkov telescopes under-ice or underwater, mostly relay on the observation of high energy cosmic rays and on the rather recent discover of many unexpected γ-TeV emitter sources in our galaxy. Indeed, in spite of the continuous and remarkable progresses in cosmic ray physics, including the recent data of AUGER [1] on UHECR the problem of the origin of the cosmic rays is not completely solved. In the recent years, many theories and calculations about candidate sources, such as Supernova Remnants (SNR), Gamma Ray Bursts (GBR), Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), have been developed and carried out. In particular, SNRs and GRBs seem to provide the environment and energy conditions needed to explain the galactic and the extragalactic cosmic rays respectively. However, experimentally is not possible, on the basis of current data, to establish a correlation between the observed particles on Earth and the potential cosmic accelerators.