Search

The high-energy muon neutrino events of the IceCube telescope, that are triggered as neutrino alerts in one of two probability ranks of astrophysical origin, "gold" and "bronze", have been followed up by the Baikal-GVD in a fast quasi-online mode since September 2020. Search for correlations between alerts and GVD events reconstructed in two modes, muon-track and cascades (electromagnetic or hadronic showers), for the time windows $ \pm $ 1 h and $ \pm $ 12 h does not indicate statistically significant excess of the measured events over the expected number of background events. Upper limits on the neutrino fluence will be presented for each alert., Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings for the VLVnT 2021 conference, submitted to JINST

Baikal-GVD (Gigaton Volume Detector) is a neutrino telescope located in pure water of Lake Baikal. At the current stage (season 2021), detector is composed of 2304 optical modules arranged in 8 clusters. In searching for neutrino cascade events, light patterns produced via discrete stochastic energy losses along muon tracks create the most abundant background. Methods to separate cascade-like events from tracks and neutrino cascades in a single cluster have been developed and optimized. One of the method tries to find the maximum number of track hits amongst cascade hits, which are present in the muon bundle event. Other ones rely on the distributions of charges and positions of hits on optical modules associated with cascade events. All suppression methods were optimized by the Monte Carlo simulation datasets.

The large-scale deep underwater Cherenkov neutrino telescopes like Baikal-GVD, ANTARES or KM3NeT, require calibration and testing methods of their optical modules. These methods usually include laser-based systems which allow to check the telescope responses to the light and for real-time monitoring of the optical parameters of water such as absorption and scattering lengths, which show seasonal changes in natural reservoirs of water. We will present a testing method of a laser calibration system and a set of dedicated tools developed for Baikal- GVD, which includes a specially designed and built, compact, portable, and reconfigurable scanning station. This station is adapted to perform fast quality tests of the underwater laser sets just before their deployment in the telescope structure, even on ice, without darkroom. The testing procedure includes the energy stability test of the laser device, 3D scan of the light emission from the diffuser and attenuation test of the optical elements of the laser calibration system. The test bench consists primarily of an automatic mechanical scanner with a movable Si detector, beam splitter with a reference Si detector and, optionally, Q-switched diode-pumped solid-state laser used for laboratory scans of the diffusers. The presented test bench enables a three-dimensional scan of the light emission from diffusers, which are designed to obtain the isotropic distribution of photons around the point of emission. The results of the measurement can be easily shown on a 3D plot immediately after the test and may be also implemented to a dedicated program simulating photons propagation in water, which allows to check the quality of the diffuser in the scale of the Baikal-GVD telescope geometry., Comment: Presented at the VLVnT - Very Large Volume Neutrino Telescope Workshop, Valencia, 18-21 May 2021

The Baikal-GVD is a neutrino telescope situated in the deepest freshwater lake in the world — Lake Baikal. The design of the Baikal-GVD trigger system allows also to study the ambient light of the lake. The analysis of the optical light activity of Baikal water, particularly, time and spatial variations of the luminescence activity for data collected in years 2018, 2019, and 2020 is presented. For the first time we observed highly luminescent layer moving upwards with maximal speed of 28 m/day in January 2021.