KM3NeT: A km3-scale neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean Sea

The KM3NeT consortium aims at the construction of a research infrastructure in the Mediterranean deep sea, hosting a neutrino telescope with an instrumented volume of several km3 and an integrated platform for earth and deep sea sciences. The telescope location in the Mediterranean Sea will allow for surveying a large part of the Galactic Plane, including the Galactic Centre, thus complementing the sky coverage of the IceCube telescope located at the South Pole. A telescope deployed in deep sea water is expected to have a very good angular resolution (of the order of 0.1◦ for neutrinos with 100 TeV energy), providing high sensitivity to point-like sources. The realization of this project will provide the scientific community with a powerful instrument to study and constrain the mechanisms at play in a broad range of astrophysical objects, including supernova remnants, active galactic nuclei, gamma-ray bursts and possibly also dark matter. This challenging project will require the installation of thousands of photon detectors with their related electronics and calibration systems several kilometers below sea level. This contribution presents an outline of the technological aspects of the project and a discussion of its main physics goals and expected performances, with a proposed preliminary timeline towards the completion of this instrument.