Speaker
Description
The subsea cabled infrastructure of LNS-INFN continuously expands both in number of observing systems, and in capacity to host new assets.
Since 2024, the historical Test Site offshore the port of Catania, at 2100 m water depth, has been upgraded with the installation of a short-baseline, large bandwidth tetrahedral antenna, deployed in the framework of the IPANEMA project.
In 2025, a Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) system acquired by CSFNSM under the VONGOLA project was permanently connected to the underwater cable, enabling joint testing of complementary techniques for acoustic soundscape monitoring and studies,.
Meanwhile, at the Capo Passero Site—primarily dedicated to the KM3NeT ARCA detector—another DAS unit was connected to the main electro-optical cable under the EU LowNoiser project.
In addition, a set of three seafloor hydrophones, deployed at relative distances of about 100 m, continuously streams data allowing long term study of noise in the band between few tens Hz and 70 kHz.
Finally, a new subsea data and power hub for multidisciplinary science, funded under the ITINIERIS project, has been built and it will be deployed soon.
Alongside this extensive hardware upgrade, several software tools for soundscape analysis and sound cataloguing have been developed, relying both on standard DSP methods and on new AI techniques.
A FAIR-oriented approach for data preservation has also been implemented and shared with project stakeholders.
This combination of Several acoustic sensors, multiple connection ports, and advanced software tools provides unprecedented opportunities to study the acoustic detection of ultra high energy (UHE) particles in the deep sea.