Paolo Desiati

Neutrino Astronomy at The South Pole
(The most recent results from AMANDA-II)

AMANDA-II is the largest neutrino telescope collecting data at the moment, and its main goal is to search for sources of high energy extreterrestrial neutrinos. The detection of such sources could give incontrovertible evidence for the acceleration of charged hadrons in cosmic objects like Supernova Remnants, Microquasars, Active Galactic Nuclei or Gamma Ray Bursts. The talk will provide the most recent results on the search for diffuse and point-like fluxes of high energy neutrinos as well as results on the measurements of the atmospheric neutrino energy spectrum above 1 TeV. It will also address the search for Supernova explosions in our Galaxy using low-energy neutrinos and results on the the search for dark matter candidates in the form of MSSM neutralinos. Even though AMANDA-II did not yet provide evidence of high energy neutrinos, its sensitivity has been greatly improved and is approaching the Waxman-Bahcall bound level. A further significant improvement in sensitivity is expected with the kilometer cube successor IceCube.