In the news

Illinois is poised to become a hub for quantum computing with investments from the the State of Illinois and the U.S. Department of Defense’s DARPA agency in a new QC campus. The Quantum Enterprise Zone will be a supportive environment for startups and entrepreneurs, offering access to resources, funding, and expertise. Fermilab and Argonne National Laboratories will also facilitate collaboration and knowledge transfer between academia and industry.

The UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) awarded Lancaster University £928,000 for the DUNE Anode Plane Assemblies project and £901,000 for the DUNE Reconstruction Software and Distributed Computing initiative. These projects form part of a wider UK DUNE collaboration that is providing significant effort in areas key to the success of the DUNE project.

The historic University of Chicago Accelerator Building will be taken down soon and the space will become a new, expanded building for engineering and science innovation. It once housed the cyclotron, designed by Enrico Fermi, and was the world’s most powerful particle accelerator using a 2,500-ton magnet to accelerate particles such as protons and nuclei. Read more about building and how the the cyclotron’s gigantic magnet was shipped off to become part of other experiments at what would later become Fermilab.

Digging into neutrino research

Now that the excavation of 800,000 tons of rock from the Sanford Underground Research Facility is complete, LBNF-DUNE teams are working on the the far detector in South Dakota and the near detector at Fermilab in Illinois. The science collaboration includes more than 35 countries and DOE’s Office of Science is supporting the LBNF-DUNE to help answer some of physics’ biggest questions.

Secrets behind our universe’s existence revealed

Faculty and students in the Experimental Neutrino Physics group at Syracuse University are working on DUNE detector construction, operation and analysis. This includes collaboration work on the the 2×2 prototype, a new prototype “pixel” Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber detector and the Short-Baseline Near Detector.

The 2×2 detector has captured its first neutrino interactions at Fermilab with help from scientists at SLAC. The prototype neutrino detector will help fine-tune a full-size version of the DUNE Near Detector Liquid Argon detector and will capture up to 10,000 neutrino interactions per day.