The KM3Net project: A neutrino telescope in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea

The KM3NeT Collaboration has started the first phase of construction of a next generation high-energy neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean Sea. With several cubic kilometers instrumented and thousand of optical sensors, KM3NeT will be the largest and most sensitive high-energy neutrino telescope. Thanks to its location in the Northern hemisphere and to its large instrumented volume KM3NeT will be the optimal instrument to search for neutrinos from the Southern sky and in particular from the Galactic plane, thus making it complementary to IceCube. The full KM3NeT detector will be a distributed, networked infrastructure comprising several detector blocks. In Italy, off the coast of Capo Passero, and in France, off the coast of Toulon, the construction of the KM3NeT-It and KM3NeT-Fr infrastructures respectively is in progress. In this work the technologically innovative component of the detector, the status of construction and the first results from prototypes of the KM3NeT detector will be described and its capability to discover neutrino sources is reported as well