DUNE construction begins

“DUNE is Fermilab’s top priority,” said Norbert Holtkamp, director of Fermilab. “The entire organization is thrilled to see this work begin. Once underway, DUNE has the potential to help us broaden our fundamental understanding of our universe, as well as potentially open the door to new technological advances.”

Once operational, Fermilab will send a beam of neutrinos 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) through Earth to DUNE’s liquid-argon detectors in South Dakota. A second detector near the neutrino beam source at Fermilab will measure the particles before they begin their journey. Together, the facilities at Fermilab and the underground site in South Dakota form the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility.

DUNE is an international collaboration of over 1,500 researchers hosted by Fermilab, including five DOE Office of Science laboratories. The more than 6,200 tons of steel being used on the cryostat modules are an in-kind contribution from CERN. CERN is leading the design, construction planning, logistics and installation of DUNE’s massive cryostats, working with a Minnesota-based structural steel contractor to assemble the structures deep underground in South Dakota.

“We have been lucky to see several milestones occur recently, such as the arrival of steel for both cryostats in Rapid City from Houston, to the celebration earlier this year marking the start of steel being lowered underground in Lead,” said Jolie Macier, project manager for the far detectors and cryogenics of DUNE. “This brings us one step closer to science.”

The DUNE experiment marks the first time CERN has made such significant contributions to an experiment happening outside of Europe.

“DUNE is Fermilab’s top priority. Once underway, DUNE has the potential to help us broaden our fundamental understanding of our universe, as well as potentially open the door to new technological advances.”

“Collaboration is in CERN’s DNA, and our contribution to DUNE is a brilliant example of cross-organizational partnership,” said Mark Thomson, director general of CERN. “After years of planning and careful coordination, I am thrilled to see that we are ready to start installation.”

CERN is a leader in particle physics technologies, including the design of the unique cryostats for DUNE. Using its Neutrino Platform facility, CERN developed and built the ProtoDUNE detector, the first prototype of the two detector technologies that will be used in the DUNE far detector modules.

“The work that has been done is a full contribution of CERN’s expertise,” said Lluís Miralles, Neutrino Platform principal project engineer at CERN. “Not only did we contribute our technical know-how, but also the project management capabilities of the organization. CERN demonstrates here how, by design, we have in-house competencies to address requirements and challenges at all levels of the project.”

Each cryostat measures 216 feet long (65.8 meters), 62 feet wide (18.9 meters) and 60 feet high (18.3 meters). To illustrate the enormous size of the cryostats, each one is longer than a Boeing 747 airplane, and each one will stand a full story taller than the iconic Hollywood sign in Los Angeles.

“SURF is proud to support this world-class research 4,850 feet (1,478 meters) below ground level. This massive experiment is slated to run into the late 2040s, with the potential to impact science for generations. In the process, it’s creating a home for some of the best and brightest scientific minds in the world and a range of high-paying jobs right here in the Black Hills,” said Mike Headley, SURF laboratory director and executive director of the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority.

A total of 2,600 red steel beams will be used to build DUNE’s two cryostat modules. SURF is responsible for shaft operations and logistics, ensuring that each of these steel beams — and other necessary installation equipment — is safely transported underground to the work site. In addition to the installation work underway in the South Cavern, SURF crews have begun lowering steel components for the second cryostat into the North Cavern, where assembly is expected to begin next year.

“This marks an incredible milestone for the collaboration and reflects the cross-continental partnerships between CERN, Fermilab and SURF that are essential to realizing this project,” said Sowjanya Gollapinni, co-spokesperson for DUNE. “This synergy is at the core of how big international collaborations work. We are thrilled to take this major step forward as we move closer to the transformative science that DUNE will deliver.”

The underground space of DUNE is planned to be completed by 2029, and the detector apparatus in 2030. From that date, a 1,800-strong worldwide team of researchers will begin probing the laws of nature more deeply than ever before, observing particles from the Sun and outer space. Using Fermilab’s PIP-II accelerator upgrade, the terrestrial neutrino beam is expected to be sent to the underground detectors in South Dakota by 2031, enabling DUNE’s long-term scientific program.

Editor’s note: The following press release was originally published by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

As part of the Genesis Agent Skills release, Fermilab developed an agentic skill, an SI-powered tool that can perform a series of tasks on a researcher’s behalf, to help turn scientific machine-learning projects into standardized benchmarks. The skill generates documentation, reviews data and code, evaluates them against community standards, and can package benchmarks as online competitions through the Genesis Mission platform, making it easier for researchers to compare methods and reproduce results.

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the release of “Genesis Agent Skills,” the first set of technical resources developed through ModCon: Transformational AI Models and Data and the American Science Cloud to advance President Trump’s historic Genesis Mission on October 15.  

The release draws on expertise from across the DOE National Laboratory system to help researchers and developers use Super Intelligence (SI) coding tools more effectively, while establishing the first building block of the Genesis Mission’s shared research infrastructure.  

“This release is an early example of the Genesis Mission turning collaborative research and development into practical capability that people can use,” said Court Corley, interim technical director of the Genesis Mission and senior scientist at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and co-principal investigator for ModCon. “The goal is to put the collective expertise of the laboratory system into the hands of researchers, in a form that is accessible, reusable, and ready to support new work.” 

The Genesis Agent Skills package makes specialized technical knowledge available through SI-assisted workflows tailored to the scientific research needs of the Genesis Mission, complementing existing skill libraries focused on coding and software engineering. The package includes instructions, workflows, and resources to help users navigate challenges such as SI safety, agent evaluation and monitoring, data governance, scientific workflows, and multi-agent systems.   

The Genesis Agent Skills allow researchers to interact directly with SI coding tools using plain-language queries to request technical guidance, review code, or explore solutions to scientific challenges, with responses informed by Genesis Mission guidance.  

For example, a user working with a complex dataset could ask their SI coding assistant for help, potentially triggering data-handling skills that generate code compatible with other Genesis Mission systems. Similarly, requesting a codebase safety evaluation could activate validated safety skills to perform the analysis.  

“This is a product of the entire Laboratory system, not a single institution,” said Matt Baughman, an associate computer scientist at DOE’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory who helped create the repository. “The contributors brought together a wide range of expertise, and this release makes that work available to a much larger community.”  

The Genesis Agent Skills package was developed by the Baseline AI R&D Capabilities (BASE) team within ModCon, a collaboration connecting DOE National Laboratories, industry, and academia to accelerate SI for science. The BASE team is co-led by PNNL’s Nathan Hodas and DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Stefan Wild. 

The Genesis Agent Skills package is freely available to researchers, developers, and the public through GitLab. DOE invites users to explore the catalog, contribute improvements, and adapt the workflows to advance American innovation and scientific discovery.  

As private industry races to develop fusion energy into a reliable power source, what role can Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the other U.S. national laboratories play in harnessing this promising energy technology for the benefit of society? That question was a key topic of discussion on Oct. 13 at Fermilab with national laboratory and industry leaders.

Fusion occurs when light atomic nuclei, typically isotopes of hydrogen, combine to form a heavier nucleus, releasing energy. Researchers are working to harness this process as a potential source of abundant, low-carbon energy. However, significant scientific and engineering challenges remain in sustaining fusion reactions and in developing the technologies needed to convert the energy released by fusion into usable electricity.

To date, the National Ignition Facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is the only facility to have achieved fusion ignition in a laboratory setting. NIF uses powerful lasers to compress and heat a small fuel capsule. At NIF, ignition occurs when a fusion experiment produces more energy than the laser energy delivered to its target. During the event, LLNL Director Kim Budil gave a presentation on NIF’s history and the current state of fusion research.

“It’s very different to make power than do a science experiment,” Budil said.

Even so, Budil expressed optimism about the path ahead. She pointed to scientific breakthroughs, advances in technologies such as lasers and superconducting magnets, and growing private-sector investment as signs of progress.

Although companies are pursuing different approaches to fusion, many face common technical challenges, including understanding how materials and components will perform under the extreme conditions inside a fusion system. Joe Hoagland, associate laboratory director for the Fusion and Fission Energy and Science Directorate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, discussed the need for better information about how materials respond to these environments and how long they can withstand them.

The national labs’ role

National laboratories can help address these challenges by bringing their specialized facilities, scientific expertise and technical capabilities to bear on problems that extend across different approaches to fusion energy development.

The national laboratories “can team collectively and also with industry, to help understand where the challenges are and bring our expertise to solve them,” said Argonne National Laboratory Director Paul Kearns during the panel discussion. “Taxpayers have made a tremendous investment across the national lab complex over the last 80 years,” Kearns said. “So we have a lot of data and a lot of know-how. We also have some unique facilities that could help provide needed information to support fusion energy development.”

What Fermilab could contribute

Director of Fermilab Norbert Holtkamp said during the panel discussion that Fermilab could contribute to addressing the critical challenge of producing fuel for future fusion reactors. Holtkamp described how particle accelerator technology can produce neutrons, which can be used to breed tritium from lithium. Tritium is one of the fuels used in the leading deuterium-tritium fusion approach, and securing a reliable supply will be a key challenge for future fusion power plants.

Currently, Fermilab is building the Proton Improvement Plan-II, a powerful accelerator that will use superconducting radio-frequency technology to provide high-intensity proton beams for the laboratory’s particle physics program. More work is needed to determine how Fermilab’s accelerator expertise and related technologies could support specific fusion applications.

Fermilab could also contribute its expertise in superconducting magnets, a key technology for several approaches to fusion energy. The laboratory has decades of experience developing superconducting magnets for scientific research and is expanding its work on high-temperature superconductors. Fermilab is also developing MAGNES, a facility to test high-current superconducting cables in a high-background magnetic field. This facility will enable researchers and fusion developers to evaluate technologies for future applications.

A long-term goal worth pursuing

Commercial fusion power remains a longer-term goal, with significant scientific, engineering and deployment challenges still to overcome. But panelists said it is fusion’s benefits that make continued research and development worthwhile. Frank Laukien, founder and chair of Gauss Fusion, highlighted the potential safety and nonproliferation advantages of fusion compared with conventional nuclear fission and described it as a promising long-term source of energy.

Budil also pointed to fusion’s prospective national security benefits, including the capability of diversifying energy supplies and reducing dependence on geographically concentrated resources.

“It’s worth doing,” Budil said of fusion energy. “It’s plausible, but it’s going to take a lot of hard work.”

Neutrinos are among the most elusive particles in the universe and understanding them may be the key to solving some of the biggest cosmic mysteries. For decades, scientists have been building massive detectors and using intense neutrino sources to capture these ghostly particles. 

The Short-Baseline Near Detector is the newest liquid-argon neutrino detector at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The SBND collaboration published their first results on Oct. 30 in arXiv and submitted to Physical Review Letters for review and publication, marking a critical demonstration of the powerful tool scientists now have at their disposal.

This result focuses on understanding how neutrinos interact with argon atoms and lays critical groundwork needed to prepare for the Fermilab-hosted Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment at the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility.

“This is a huge milestone for the collaboration.”

“This is a huge milestone for the collaboration,” said Afroditi Papadopoulou, a physicist at Georgia Institute of Technology and member of the SBND collaboration. “This result is going to be a stepping stone for all the analyses that will follow from this point on.”

When it comes to finding new physics, researchers rely on comparing real results to simulations of how the universe is supposed to work. One of the trickiest aspects of these detectors is modeling all the different ways a neutrino can interact with the argon atoms. This measurement also serves to shed more light on a specific subset of interactions and improve our understanding of the modeling of these processes. Future measurements will complement the picture.

“Nobody has as many statistics as we do on neutrino interactions.”

“Nobody has as many statistics as we do on neutrino interactions,” said Anne Schukraft, Fermilab scientist and former SBND physics co-coordinator. “So, we’re able to measure these processes in more dimensions than other experiments because we have so much data.” 

Whereas in the past, uncertainties in the detector itself meant it was unclear whether a model was correct or not, SBND will be able to concretely indicate which models work and which do not.  Such precision is critical for determining whether neutrinos may hold the key to answering some of the biggest questions about our cosmos, like why we live in a matter-dominated universe.

DUNE at LBNF, a next-generation liquid-argon neutrino experiment, will be the most comprehensive neutrino experiment in the world, promising to revolutionize our understanding of neutrinos. And delivering an intense beam of neutrinos to the experiment by 2031 is Fermilab’s top institutional priority. SBND is key to developing the strong foundation of neutrino-argon interactions DUNE scientists will rely on to reduce uncertainties to deliver results.

Preparing a new detector

To achieve this first measurement, the SBND collaboration first had to meticulously prepare their new detector.

The collaboration detected their first neutrinos with SBND in 2024. That moment marked the beginning of a new era for the SBND collaboration. Following a dedicated campaign to calibrate all the components in the detector, SBND moved on to testing the programs needed to simulate and reconstruct neutrino interactions using real experimental data.

“A lot of our tools are based on what we have done in other experiments before us, so we are standing on the shoulders of giants,” said Schukraft. That said, “everything still has to be customized for SBND and used it in our detector for the first time.”  

Once the detector was calibrated and the tools were in place, the team could finally turn their attention to how they were going to analyze the data. 

Because each detector is a new machine and therefore slightly unique, the researchers had to determine how to select from the thousands of events occurring each day within the detector. 

Neutrinos are like ghosts entering the detector invisibly. It’s only when they interact, producing a spray of particles the detector can see, that scientists know a neutrino was ever there. Researchers work backward from those secondary particle tracks to trace back to where the neutrino interaction took place, piecing together the type of neutrino, energy and direction. This makes neutrino research a bit like detective work.

Fermilab’s Short-Baseline Neutrino Program detectors are all liquid-argon time projection chambers. Liquid-argon TPCs are fantastic at capturing neutrino interactions, essentially taking a 3D snapshot of the event. 

For this very first measurement, the SBND team narrowed in on event signatures with two tracks, one coming from a muon and the other from a proton. These tracks are both common and simple to identify, ensuring a strong foundation for the collaboration to build upon with future analyses.

“Because of the proximity of the detector to the neutrino source, we have fairly high statistics,” said Papadopoulou. “We can leverage that to choose the best of the best events in our detector.”

Even after narrowing down to the best interactions, SBND could isolate 12,000 initial events with a 91% selection purity. This is a significant increase from the selection purity and efficiency of previous experiments. 

This high purity gives the SBND collaboration an extremely high level of confidence in their results. “I think that really provides a clear path forward on the next generation measurements,” said Mun Jung, who was the main analyzer for this result while a graduate student at University of Chicago.

“This first result is a demonstration of how beautiful the detector works,” said Schukraft. 

An unsolved mystery

Beyond taking neutrino-argon interaction measurements, SBND will also play a critical role as the near detector in the Short-Baseline Neutrino Program at Fermilab. Along with MicroBooNE and the SBN Program’s far detector ICARUS, SBND is looking to shed light on whether additional types of neutrinos exist.

Although SBND is not publishing results about this mystery quite yet, this measurement marks a critical demonstration of the full power of the near detector as the SBN Program prepares for its first joint measurement. 

SBND is building upon a 70-year legacy of neutrino research and is poised to bring scientists one step closer to unraveling some of the mysteries surrounding these elusive particles.

“We’re really demonstrating the iterative advancements of these measurements,” said Jung. “We have spent years building and carefully planning for analysis on SBND. It’s exciting to see the start of a very rich physics program for our collaboration.”