Laboratoire Sous-marin Provence Méditerranée

LSPM is a national facility of the National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics of the CNRS hosted by the CPPM research unit. Both the AMU and IFREMER institutions participate in the management of the whole facility whose missions range from multidisciplinary research to scientific communication activities.
LSPM consits of an underwater infrastructure, set at a depth of 2,500 meters, 40 kilometres south of Toulon, with real-time transmission of data from the underwater instruments to the control rooms onshore (La Seyne-sur-Mer, Marseille). The LSPM platform in particular hosts the KM3NeT's ORCA neutrino detector, as well as several EMSO environmental sensors. Further submarine connection links are made available for external users. In addition, the underwater facility is made of: electro-optical connection cables, junction boxes for interfacing underwater instrumentation, a long base acoustic positioning system, and a junction box dedicated to environmental measurements.

LSPM is open to scientific communities of both the academic and private sectors, upon request.

The platform offers services to connect deep-sea instrumentation into the sea-floor network and allows high bandwidth, continuous, readout of the sensors. It also provides an acoustic positioning system capable to position equipment at 1m-precision. The equipment to connect to the facility must be compatible with the KM3NeT deep-sea neutrino telescope. No constraints are observed on the available power budget.