ANTARES: status report

The ANTARES collaboration aims at the construction of a large underwater neutrino telescope to be deployed in the Mediterranean Sea by 2500 m depth, 40 km off the coast, near Toulon (France). The detector consists in a 3-D array of photo-multiplier tubes to detect the Čerenkov light emitted in sea water by muons produced by the charged interaction of neutrinos in the surrounding matter. The R&D phase of the project comes to a conclusion with the deployments of a subset of a vertical string (December 2002) and of a line equipped with instrumentation for environmental monitoring (February 2003), and with the submarine connections of both lines to the already installed electro-optical cable (March 2003). In this contribution, after a description of the detector, we will go through the main steps leading to the first operation of the detector. Results from the 100 day operation will also be presented.