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CERN’s ProtoDUNE has entered a pivotal stage: the filling of one of its two particle detectors with liquid argon. The liquid argon will provide a clean environment for precise measurements in neutrino interactions and allow scientists to detect and study neutrino interactions.

Rigging crews at SURF are performing a series of tests using a large wooden model L-beam built to the same scale as one of the huge steel components that arrived in South Dakota in January after being shipped from Spain. The tests are being done in anticipation of lowering the real thing down the shaft to the underground 4850 level.

The Tachyon Project of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been awarded a five-year grant from the U.S. DOE HEP to model, simulate and validate the transport, transmission and analysis of particle physics data using extreme-scale computing systems, AI and ML techniques. Tachyon will utilize data and information from Fermilab to model the entire distributed infrastructure required to transmit and analyze data from DUNE to the computing facilities at the Argonne in near real time.

Physicists from Syracuse University are part of the more than 1,400 scientists that make up the DUNE collaboration. The Syracuse team were involved in the development and testing of the first detector’s components, helping finalize the design and testing plans of the anode plane assemblies. The team also researched and developed light sensors for the first detector’s module and investigated how adding small amounts of the element xenon could improve their performance.

Physicists from the University of Texas at Arlington will build portions of the first two far detectors to be installed at the South Dakota site fro DUNE. Having been part of the collaboration since its earliest stages, UTA physicists also assisted in the construction of prototype detectors at CERN.

Fermi Research Alliance awarded Prof. Yasar Onel, from the University of Iowa, a grant to design a helium gas regulation system for neutrinos at the Main Injector beam monitors at Fermilab. The grant also allows for work on a gas regulation design study, prototype and consultation on a gas regulator system for the DUNE NuMI beam monitors.

Current understandings of neutrino-nucleon interactions rely on data from experiments in the 1970s and ’80s. However, by using lattice quantum chromodynamics to predict stronger neutrino-nucleon interactions, scientists can determine oscillation properties of the elusive neutrinos in Fermilab’s DUNE experiment and other neutrino oscillation experiments.

Scientists are using a new machine learning tool called sparse convolutional neural networks, or SCNNs, to analyze data faster and more efficiently than ever before. SCNNs are expected to play a critical role in analyzing the data gathered from the upcoming DUNE experiment.

Plans are moving ahead for the liquid nitrogen refrigeration system which will use liquid nitrogen to cool the 17,500 tons of liquid argon that will fill the neutrino detectors at the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility in the Sanford Lab. The system is expected to be built by 2026, and operational underground by the end of 2026 to support the installation of some detector elements, and the operations of the full facility starting in early 2028.

From PNNL, July 25, 2023: PNNL researchers and a team of university and national laboratory collaborators recently published a paper detailing a new detector design that can be fine-tuned to increase sensitivity to physics beyond the original DUNE concept. The new detector, named SLoMo, will enhances DUNE’s sensitivity to neutrinos emitted from sources other than the beam of neutrinos created at Fermilab.