Baikal-GVD: Status and prospects

Abstract

Baikal-GVD is a next generation, kilometer-scale neutrino telescope under construction in Lake Baikal. It is designed to detect astrophysical neutrino fluxes at energies from a few TeV up to 100 PeV. GVD is formed by multi-megaton subarrays (clusters). The array construction started in 2015 by deployment of a reduced-size demonstration cluster named Dubna. The first cluster in it's baseline configuration was deployed in 2016, the second in 2017 and the third in 2018. The full-scale GVD will be an array of ~10.000 light sensors with an instrumented volume about of 2 cubic km. The first phase (GVD-1) is planned to be completed by 2020-2021. It will comprise 8 clusters with 2304 light sensors in total. We describe the design of Baikal-GVD and present selected results obtained in 2015 - 2017.