High-Energy Neutrino Astronomy—Baikal-GVD Neutrino Telescope in Lake Baikal

Abstract

High-energy neutrino astronomy is a fascinating new field of research, rapidly developing over recent years. It opens a new observation window on the most violent processes in the universe, fitting very well to the concept of multi-messenger astronomy. This may be exemplified by the recent discovery of the high-energy neutrino emissions from the γ-ray loud blazar TXS 0506+056. Constraining astrophysical neutrino fluxes can also help to understand the long-standing mystery of the origin of the ultra-high energy cosmic rays. Astronomical studies of high-energy neutrinos are carried out by large-scale next-generation neutrino telescopes located in different regions of the world, forming a global network of complementary detectors. The Baikal-GVD, being currently the largest neutrino telescope in the Northern Hemisphere and still growing up, is an important constituent of this network. This paper briefly reviews working principles, analysis methods, and some selected results of the Baikal-GVD neutrino telescope.

High-energy spectra of the atmospheric neutrinos: predictions and measurements

“…Thus we can infer from the analysis that the highenergy atmospheric neutrino spectra calculated with the consistent scheme [19,[24][25][26][27][28][29] are sufficiently reliable and might be suitable for numerical simulation of the atmospheric neutrino events in the operating neutrino telescopes, as well as in the future experiments, Baikal-GVD [55][56][57], IceCube-Gen2 [58,59], and KM3NeT/ORCA [60]. We expect that increased statistics on the muon, electron and tau neutrino events due to functional capabilities of the next generation of neutrino telescopes will enable one to solve the prompt neutrino problem.…”

Machine learning based background rejection for Baikal-GVD neutrino telescope

“…The telescope's data are modeled with the help of Monte-Carlo simulations for the arriving muons (originating from cosmic rays) and neutrinos, see [3] for the details. Due to technical reasons, in the present work we consider only the muon neutrino subsample of the neutrino simulations.…”

“…Recent years has demonstrated an increase of interest in studying neutrino astrophysics with the help of neutrino telescopes [1,2,3,4]. One of the experiments aimed at such studies is Baikal-GVD [5,6], located in Lake Baikal, Russia.…”

Rejecting noise in Baikal-GVD data with neural networks

“…Two types of incoming particles are considered: 1) muon neutrinos arriving from under the horizon, and 2) bundles of muons originating from the cosmic air showers. The energy spectrum and incoming directions of arriving particles are chosen to coincide with the ones expected in the experiment, see [8,9] for details. The procedure takes into account photon scattering in Baikal's water and full simulation of cosmic air showers' evolution using QGSJET II-03 [10] and CORSIKA [11].…”