The DUMAND Project (Deep Underwater Muon And Neutrino Detector Project) was a proposed underwater

neutrino telescope A neutrino detector is a physics apparatus which is designed to study neutrinos. Because neutrinos only weakly interact with other particles of matter, neutrino detectors must be very large to detect a significant number of neutrinos. Neutrino ...

to be built in the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five Borders of the oceans, oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean, or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is ...

, off the shore of the

island of Hawaii Hawaii is the List of islands of the United States by area, largest island in the United States, located in the Hawaii, state of Hawaii, the southernmost state in the union. It is the southeasternmost of the Hawaiian Islands, a chain of volcani ...

, five kilometers beneath the surface. It would have included thousands of strings of instruments occupying a cubic kilometer of the

ocean The ocean is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of Earth. The ocean is conventionally divided into large bodies of water, which are also referred to as ''oceans'' (the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Indian, Southern Ocean ...

The proposal called for two types of detectors: optical detectors to find the

Cherenkov radiation Cherenkov radiation () is electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through a dielectric medium (such as distilled water) at a speed greater than the phase velocity (speed of propagation of a wavefro ...

emitted by secondary particles traveling faster than the

speed of light The speed of light in vacuum, commonly denoted , is a universal physical constant exactly equal to ). It is exact because, by international agreement, a metre is defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time i ...

in water, resulting from collisions by

neutrino A neutrino ( ; denoted by the Greek letter ) is an elementary particle that interacts via the weak interaction and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass is so small ('' -ino'') that i ...

s, and

hydrophone A hydrophone () is a microphone designed for underwater use, for recording or listening to underwater sound. Most hydrophones contains a piezoelectric transducer that generates an electric potential when subjected to a pressure change, such as a ...

s to listen for the acoustic signals generated by the interactions. Sophisticated

signal processing Signal processing is an electrical engineering subfield that focuses on analyzing, modifying and synthesizing ''signals'', such as audio signal processing, sound, image processing, images, Scalar potential, potential fields, Seismic tomograph ...

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 In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscle in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from s ...

or acoustic sources. Because of the nature of the interaction between neutrinos and protons, DUMAND would have been most sensitive to ultra-high energy neutrinos, and completely insensitive to

solar neutrino A solar neutrino is a neutrino originating from nuclear fusion in the Sun's core, and is the most common type of neutrino passing through any source observed on Earth at any particular moment. Neutrinos are elementary particles with extremely smal ...

s. Work began in about 1976, at

Keahole Point Keāhole Point is the westernmost point of the island of Hawaii. The Kona International Airport was moved here from directly north of the town of Kailua-Kona in 1970, when the previous smaller airstrip was converted into the Old Kona Airport Sta ...

, but the project cancelled in 1995 due to technical difficulties. Although it was never completed, DUMAND was in a sense a precursor of the

Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array The Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) was a neutrino telescope that was located beneath the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. In 2005, after nine years of operation, AMANDA became part of its successor project, the IceCube Neut ...

(AMANDA), and the water Cherenkov neutrino telescopes in the

Mediterranean The Mediterranean Sea ( ) is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the east by the Levant in West Asia, on the north by Anatolia in West Asia and Southern ...

(

ANTARES Antares is the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpius. It has the Bayer designation α Scorpii, which is Latinisation of names, Latinised to Alpha Scorpii. Often referred to as "the heart of the scorpion", Antares is flanked by ...

, NEMO and the

NESTOR Project The NESTOR Project (Neutrino Extended Submarine Telescope with Oceanographic Research Project) is an international scientific collaboration whose target is the deployment of a neutrino telescope on the sea floor off Pylos, Greece. Neutrino Neut ...

). The DUMAND hardware was also donated to NESTOR, to reduce costs and cut on development and construction time.

References

External links

DUMAND
experiment record on

INSPIRE-HEP INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 1 ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dumand Project Hawaii (island) Neutrino observatories Particle experiments

References

Further reading

External links