  The ANTARES collaboration is constructing a neutrino telescope in the
Mediterranean Sea at a depth of 2400 metres, about 40 kilometres off the French
coast near Toulon. The detector will consist of 12 vertical strings anchored at
the sea bottom, each supporting 25 triplets of optical modules equipped with
photomultipliers, yielding sensitivity to neutrinos with energies above some 10
GeV. The effective detector area is roughly 0.1 square kilometres for neutrino
energies exceeding 10 TeV. The measurement of the Cherenkov light emitted by
muons produced in muon-neutrino charged-current interactions in water and
under-sea rock will permit the reconstruction of the neutrino direction with an
accuracy of better than 0.3 degrees at high energies. ANTARES will complement
the field of view of neutrino telescopes at the South Pole in the
low-background searches for point-sources of high-energy cosmic neutrinos and
will also be sensitive to neutrinos produced by WIMP annihilation in the Sun or
the Galactic centre.
