NESTOR is the first step toward the construction of a neutrino telescope using the depth of the sea both as a shield against atmospheric muons and as detector material. The experiment is based on the ...detection of Cerenkov radiation produced by neutrino muons using 12″ photomultiplier tubes. 168 PMTs will be arranged in 12 floors separated by 20 m each and with a radius of 16 m.
We report the results of a search for neutrino-induced particle cascades using a deep ocean water Cherenkov detector. The effective mass of the detector, a string of seven 40 cm diameter ...photomultipliers at 5.2 m spacing, is found through simulation analysis to be surprisingly large: greater than 1 megaton of water at incident neutrino energies of 1 PeV. We find no evidence for neutrino-induced cascades in 18.6 hours of observation. Although the limit implied by this observation is the strongest yet for predictions of active galatic nuclei (AGN) neutrinos at energies above 100 TeV, perhaps the more intriguing result is that the power of these techniques can be exploited to test these AGN models in a relatively short time.
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