English

Study of acoustic neutrino detection in O$\nu$DE-2 raw acoustic data

Instrumentation and Detectors 2026-04-08 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

Research suggests that acoustic technology may be able to detect ultra-high-energy neutrinos if a large amount of non-linear fluid is analyzed. When a neutrino interacts in water, it creates a quasi-instantaneous cascade of particles, heating that region of the fluid and emitting a tiny acoustic signal. This rapid heating produces a thermoacoustic Bipolar Pulse (BP) with unique characteristics such as a wide bandwidth and a narrow directivity for these frequencies. While dedicated devices for acoustic neutrino detection are currently non-existent, there are a few underwater neutrino telescopes that utilize optical technology, but often with an acoustic positioning system that deploys hydrophones in the infrastructure. The possibility of using them to study a BP caused by a neutrino interaction is currently being discussed. This study aims to evaluate the implementation of a trigger system to detect a possible BP in deep-sea hydrophones. For this, up to 24 hours of the raw acoustic signal recorded by the Oν\nuDE-2 station, which was located 25 km off-shore from Catania in the Western Ionian Sea, at 2100 m depth, is analyzed. The station used calibrated hydrophones from a few Hz to 70 kHz. In this work, a synthetic BP is created and added to the experimental data, allowing the study of its detection and the calculation of precision and recall.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.04472,
  title  = {Study of acoustic neutrino detection in O$\nu$DE-2 raw acoustic data},
  author = {D. Bonanno and L. S. Di Mauro and D. Diego-Tortosa and A. Idrissi and G. Riccobene and S. Sanfilippo and S. Viola},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.04472},
  year   = {2026}
}