The birth of high-energy neutrino astronomy: A personal history of the DUMAND project

DUMAND is a project to build a Deep Underwater Muon And Neutrino Detector offshore near the island of Hawaii. At present under construction, it hopes to inaugurate the field of high-energy neutrino astronomy. Potential sources of high-energy neutrinos are listed, and estimates of neutrino intensity given. The paper is concerned with the physics, technology, and history of the project, which started informally in 1973. It survived through a series of summer conferences until it was funded as a feasibility study in 1979 and established in the Hawaii DUMAND Center, at the University of Hawaii. Over a dozen collaborating groups have contributed to the successful construction and operation of DUMAND I, the SPS or Short Prototype String, which established the benign character of the ocean environment and demonstrated its suitability for DUMAND II, a 216-phototube array now under construction. DUMAND II, recently funded, will have more than 20 times the area of any existing detector and a mass of almost 2 million tons; this size is minimal for the intensities and cross sections anticipated. The project became feasible—both technically and financially—through important technical advances in data transmission via fiber optics, high-speed computer technology, special photomultiplier tubes made by Hamamatsu and Philips, remotely controlled undersea vehicles with manipulative abilities, and many deep-sea electronic and oceanographic components. It is supported by an international collaboration with 15 collaborating institutions in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. It is scheduled to install a three-string test array (TRIAD) by late 1992, and the complete nine-string array is scheduled for operation in late 1993.