Abstract : The MEUST (Mediterranean Eurocentre for Underwater Sciences and Technologies) is a
permanent deep sea cabled infrastructure currently being deployed off shore of Toulon, France.
MEUST is shared between the neutrino physics and astro-physics communities in the context
of the European KM3NeT project, and the Environmental Science communities as the West-
Ligurian site of the EMSO European network of submarine observatories. The MEUST
submarine network has a modular and extendable topology which will allow hosting up to
120 neutrino detection units and to instrument a seafloor area with sea science sensors. The
MEUST terrestrial base is located in La Seyne sur Mer near Toulon, where a new building
is planned to host the technical activities, including a control room of the infrastructure.
The MEUST submarine site has been selected after intensive characterization campaigns
conducted in the past years leading to the choice of the site located ˜40km offshore of Toulon
at a depth of 2500m and 15km west of the Antares site. The full MEUST submarine network
has up to 6 nodes connected to the shore by two Main Electro Optical Cables (MEOC). The
MEOCs are standard telecommunication cables with optical fibres for data transfer and one
electrical conductor for power transfer. The nodes are equipped each with 8 wet mate-able
connectors allowing to connect at least 20 neutrino detection units (daisy chained by 4) and a
set of environmental instruments, with some redundancy. The power transfer is performed
in HV AC with sea return, as for Antares, and provides a usable power of ˜10kW on each
node (˜1kW/connector). A dedicated control/command system controls the power and optical
systems. The data transfer uses Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM). The
proposed talk will focus on the design and the status of the infrastructure with the first lessons
learnt from the ongoing deployments.
