TheDUMAND Project (DeepUnderwaterMuonAndNeutrinoDetectorProject) was a proposed underwaterneutrino telescope to be built in thePacific Ocean, off the shore of theisland of Hawaii,[1] five kilometers beneath the surface. It would have included thousands of strings of instruments occupying a cubic kilometer of theocean.
The proposal called for two types of detectors:optical detectors to find theCherenkov radiation emitted by secondary particles traveling faster than thespeed of light in water, resulting from collisions byneutrinos, andhydrophones to listen for theacoustic signals generated by the interactions. Sophisticatedsignal processing would have combined the signals from many optical and acoustic sensors, allowing scientists to determine the direction from which the neutrino arrived, and to rule outfalse signals arising from otherparticles or acoustic sources. Because of thenature of the interaction between neutrinos and protons, DUMAND would have been most sensitive toultra-high energy neutrinos, and completely insensitive tosolar neutrinos.
Work began in about 1976, atKeahole Point, but the project cancelled in 1995 due to technical difficulties. Although it was never completed, DUMAND was in a sense a precursor of theAntarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA), and the water Cherenkov neutrino telescopes in theMediterranean (ANTARES,NEMO and theNESTOR Project). The DUMAND hardware was also donated to NESTOR, to reduce costs and cut on development and construction time.[2]
DUMAND experiment record onINSPIRE-HEP