No Arabic abstract
Currently in Lake Baikal, a new generation neutrino telescope is being deployed: the deep underwater Cherenkov detector of a cubic-kilometer scale Baikal-GVD. Completion of the first stage of the telescope construction is planned for 2021 with the implementation of 9 clusters. Each cluster is a completely independent unit in all the aspects: triggering, calibration, data transfer, etc. A high-energy particle might leave its trace in more than a single cluster. To be able to merge events caused by such a particle in more clusters, the appropriate inter-cluster time synchronization is vital.
In April 2019, the Baikal-GVD collaboration finished the installation of the fourth and fifth clusters of the neutrino telescope Baikal-GVD. Momentarily, 1440 Optical Modules (OM) are installed in the largest and deepest freshwater lake in the world, Lake Baikal, instrumenting 0.25 cubic km of sensitive volume. The Baikal-GVD is thus the largest neutrino telescope on the Northern Hemisphere. The first phase of the detector construction is going to be finished in 2021 with 9 clusters, 2592 OMs in total, however the already installed clusters are stand-alone units which are independently operational and taking data from their commissioning. Huge number of channels as well as strict requirements for the precision of the time and charge calibration (ns, p.e.) make calibration procedures vital and very complex tasks. The inter cluster time calibration is performed with numerous calibration systems. The charge calibration is carried out with a Single Photo-Electron peak. The various data acquired during the last three years in regular and special calibration runs validate successful performance of the calibration systems and of the developed calibration techniques. The precision of the charge calibration has been improved and the time dependence of the obtained calibration parameters have been cross-checked. The multiple calibration sources verified a 1.5 - 2.0 ns precision of the in-situ time calibrations. The time walk effect has been studied in detail with in situ specialized calibration runs.
In April 2015 the demonstration cluster Dubna was deployed and started to take data in Lake Baikal. This array is the first cluster of the cubic kilometer scale Gigaton Volume Detector (Baikal-GVD), which is constructed in Lake Baikal. In this contribution we will review the design and status of the array.
The Baikal-GVD neutrino telescope currently consists of 8 clusters of 288 optical modules (photodetectors). One cluster comprises 8 strings, each of which is subdivided into 3 sections of 12 optical modules. This paper presents the methods of time synchronization between the different GVD components (optical modules, sections, clusters) and estimations of time synchronization accuracy.
We present data on the Baikal water luminescence collected with the Baikal-GVD neutrino telescope. This three-dimensional array of photo-sensors allows the observation of time and spatial variations of the ambient light field. We report on annual increase of luminescence activity in years 2018-2020. We observed a unique event of a highly luminescent layer propagating upwards with a maximum speed of 28 m/day for the first time.
The quality of the incoming experimental data has a significant importance for both analysis and running the experiment. The main point of the Baikal-GVD DQM system is to monitor the status of the detector and obtained data on the run-by-run based analysis. It should be fast enough to be able to provide analysis results to detector shifter and for participation in the global multi-messaging system.