Increasing the Sensitivity of the Baikal-GVD Neutrino Telescope Using External Strings of Optical Modules

— Deployment of the deep-sea neutrino telescope Baikal-GVD continues in Lake Baikal. By April 2022, ten telescope clusters, which include 2880 optical modules, were put into operation. One of the urgent tasks of the Baikal project is to study the possibility of increasing the detection efficiency of the detector based on the experience of its operation and the results obtained with other neutrino telescopes in recent years. In this paper, the authors consider a variant of optimizing the telescope configuration by installing an additional string of optical modules between the detector clusters (external string). An experimental version of the external garland was installed in Lake Baikal in April 2022. The paper presents the results from calculations of the efficiency of registration of neutrino events for a new setup configuration, the technical implementation of the system for recording and collecting data from the external garland, and the first results of its full-scale tests in Lake Baikal.