Baikal – first underwater neutrino telescope

Satellite image showing spring ice melt underway on Lake Baikal (Image: NASA Earth Observatory)

NT200, a detector in lake Baikal played a pioneering role in neutrino astronomy. NT200 was constructed between 1993 and 1998. However, in 1994 NT200 detected two neutrino events when only 36 of the final 192 photodetectors were set up. These were the first of several hundred thousand atmospheric neutrinos which NT200 later detected.

Many expansions have taken place recently and neutrino research at lake Baikal continues to be an important part of the efforts to better understand the high energy process that occurs in the far-distant astrophysical sources, to determine the origin of cosmic particles of the highest energies ever registered, to search for dark matter, to study properties of elementary particles and to learn a great deal of the new information about the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. 

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