A proposed deep sea Neutrino Observatory in the Nanhai

Abstract: Over the past ten years, several breakthroughs have been made in multi-messenger astronomy. Thanks to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the detection of astrophysical neutrinos was proved to be practical. However, due to the limited statistics and field of view, only a few sources have been associated with IceCube neutrinos, making new and larger neutrino telescopes necessary. We propose the NEutrino Observatory in the Nanhai (NEON), located in the South China Sea to be complementary for the global neutrino detectors. This proposal describes the design and layout of the array and reports on comprehensive simulations conducted to assess its performance. The NEON project, with a volume of 10 km$^3$, achieves an angular resolution of 0.1$^\circ$ at 100 TeV. With 10 years of operation, the project's 5$\sigma$ sensitivity is estimated as $E^2\Phi \sim 2 \times 10^{-10}$ GeV cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ for a source spectrum index of -2. We found that the variation in depth from 1700 to 3500 meters does not significantly influence the sensitivity to steady sources.