Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Research Tools and Instruments

The Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment (P--ONE) is a neutrino telescope planned for deployment in the deep ocean of the Cascadia Basin off the coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The Cascadia Basin has a very modern oceanographic instrumentation operated by Ocean Networks Canada. The site is equipped with versatile, highly reliable data and power infrastructure, ready to be used for the first stage of a neutrino telescope. To further explore this exciting site, the international P--ONE collaboration was formed, deployed site qualifying equipment and has now analyzed the data from this setup, conclusively proving that the site and the infrastructure from Ocean Networks Canada is suitable for the operation of a neutrino telescope. The pathfinder mission has also provided long term stability measurements of the optical properties of the water attenuation and the bioluminescence backgrounds over more than two years of continuing operation. The optical properties were found to be both stable and to have low scattering and long attenuation lengths proving the adequacy of the site for neutrino physics. The existing neutrino telescopes have firmly established the physics case for more instrumented volume by discovering a cosmogenic high energy neutrino flux. This flux is slightly too low to provide enough data for significant detections of point sources with the existing detectors alone. Once a neutrino flux from known point sources is established, neutrino physics will enter a new phase, where neutrinos can serve as messengers from the most energetic events and processes in the universe and neutrinos can be used to expand particle physics into a new high energy regime. To achieve this next step more neutrino telescopes will need to be distributed around the world to allow continuous coverage of the full neutrino sky. P--ONE will fill a critical gap in the coverage of the existing and planned neutrino telescopes. To demonstrate the viability of a neutrino telescope in the Pacific Ocean, P--ONE plans to deploy a full scale detector module consisting of one prototype "string" of twenty digital optical modules in the coming three years. International partners have secured significant funding for this string. The Canadian groups within the P--ONE collaboration have developed a trigger logic and need to finalize and verify the design of the central data and trigger modules that will serve as the backbone of the P--ONE experiment. Canadian groups have taken leadership roles in the development of the deep ocean systems and the trigger subsystem of P--ONE. To verify these designs a Canadian contribution to the prototype string and its deployment is requested. This will allow the P--ONE collaboration to build, test and deploy a full scale system firmly establishing that the P--ONE collaboration can design, build, test, deploy and operate a full scale optical detection system for a large scale neutrino detector in the deep Pacific Ocean.