Status of the KM3NeT project

Abstract

The KM3NeT Collaboration is constructing a research infrastructure hosting a next generation underwater neutrino observatory in the Mediterranean Sea. It will be a distributed infrastructure with two nodes: ORCA (Mton scale 2500 depth offshore Toulon (France)) and ARCA (Gton scale, 3500 m offshore Capo Passero (Italy)). The ORCA detector, optimised to detect neutrinos of tens of GeV, aims at determining the neutrino mass hierarchy. ARCA is the high-energy component and is dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial neutrino sources in the TeV-PeV range. The KM3NeT Collaboration has started the construction of both detectors. The first detection units were deployed and the data analysis is ongoing to validate the detector performances. In this paper we give a general overview of the two detectors. We also report the present status of the detector and the first results of data analysis.