How do you detect a particle that has almost no mass, feels only two of the four fundamental forces, and can travel unhindered through solid lead for an entire light-year without ever interacting with matter? This is the problem posed by neutrinos, ghostly particles that are generated in the trillions by nuclear reactions in stars, including our sun, and on Earth. Scientists can also produce neutrinos to study in controlled experiments using particle accelerators. One of the ways neutrinos can be detected is with large vats filled with liquid argon and wrapped with a complex web of integrated circuitry that can operate in temperatures colder than the average day on Neptune.
Industry does not typically use electronics that operate at cryogenic temperatures, so particle physicists have had to engineer their own. A collaboration of several Department of Energy national labs, including Fermilab, has been developing prototypes of the electronics that will ultimately be used in the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, called DUNE, hosted by Fermilab. DUNE will generate an intense beam of neutrinos at Fermilab in Illinois and send it 800 miles through the Earth’s crust to detectors in South Dakota. Results from the experiment may help scientists understand why there is more matter than antimatter, an imbalance that led to the formation of our universe.
Analog-to-digital convertors built to work at cryogenic temperatures, such as the prototype pictured here, will operate inside of liquid-argon chambers in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Photo: Alber Dyer, Fermilab
Physics and chill
DUNE’s neutrino detectors will be massive: a total of four tanks, each as high as a four-story building, will contain a combined 70,000 tons of liquid argon and be situated in a cavern a mile beneath Earth’s surface.
Argon occurs naturally as a gas in our atmosphere, and turning it into a liquid entails chilling it to extremely cold temperatures. The atomic nuclei of liquid argon are so densely packed together that some of the famously elusive neutrinos traveling from Fermilab will interact with them, leaving behind tell-tale signs of their passing. The resulting collision produces different particles that scatter in all directions, including electrons, which physicists use to reconstruct the path of the otherwise invisible neutrino.
A strong electric field maintained within the detector causes the free electrons to drift toward wires attached to sensitive electronics. As the electrons travel past the wires, they generate small voltage pulses that are recorded by electronics in the liquid-argon chamber. Amplifiers in the chamber then boost the signal by increasing the voltage, after which they are converted to digital data. Finally, the signals collected and digitized across the entire chamber are merged together and sent to computers outside the detector for storage and analysis.
Challenges for chilled electronics
The electronics in neutrino detectors work the same way as the technology we use in our everyday lives, with one major exception. The integrated circuitry in our phones, computers, cameras, cars, microwaves and other devices has been developed to operate at or around room temperature, down to about minus 40 degrees Celsius. The liquid argon in neutrino detectors, however, is cooled to around minus 200 degrees.
“If you use electronics designed to work at room temperature, rarely do you find that they work anywhere nearly as well as those designed to operate at cryogenic temperatures,” said Fermilab scientist David Christian.
In the past, this issue was sidestepped altogether by placing the electronic circuitry outside of the argon tanks. But when you’re measuring a limited number of electrons, even the slightest amount of electronics noise can mask the signal you’re looking for.
The easiest way to mitigate the problem involves the same tactic you use to keep food from spoiling: Keep it cold. If all the electronics are submerged in the liquid argon, there are fewer thermal vibrations from atoms and a larger signal-to-noise ratio. Placing the electronics in the liquid-argon tank has the added benefit of decreasing the amount of wire you have to use to deliver signals to the amplifiers. If, for example, amplifiers and analog-to-digital converters are kept outside the chamber (as they are in some neutrino detectors), long wires have to connect them to the detectors on the inside.
“If you put the electronics inside the cold chamber, you have much shorter wires and therefore lower noise,” said Carl Grace, an engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “You amplify the signal and digitize it in the argon chamber. You then have a digital interface to the outside world in which noise is no longer a concern.”
There are several design challenges these teams have had to overcome during development, not the least of which was determining how to test the durability of the devices.
“These chips will have to operate for a minimum of 20-odd years, hopefully longer,” Grace said. “And because of the nature of the argon chambers, the electronics that get put inside of them can’t cannot be changed. They cannot be swapped out or repaired in any way.”
Since Grace and his team don’t have 20 years in which to test their prototypes, they’ve approximated the effects of aging by increasing the amount of voltage powering the chips to simulate the wear and tear of regular, long-term operation.
“We take the electronics, cool them down and then elevate their voltage to accelerate their aging,” Grace said. “By observing their behavior over a relatively short period of time, we can we can then estimate how long the electronics would last if they were operated at the voltages for which they were designed.”
Resistance in circuits
Not only do these circuits need to be built to last for decades, they also need to be made more durable in another way.
Electronic circuitry has a certain amount of resistance to the electric current flowing through it. As electrons pass through a circuit, they interact with the vibrating atoms within the conducting material, which slows them down. But these interactions are reduced when the electronics are cooled to cryogenic temperatures, and the electrons that constitute the signal move more quickly on average.
This is a good thing in terms of output; the integrated circuits being built for DUNE will work more efficiently when placed in the liquid argon. But, as the electrons travel faster through the circuits as temperatures drop, they can begin to do damage to the circuitry itself.
“If electrons have a high enough kinetic energy, they can actually start ripping atoms from the crystal structure of the conducting material,” Grace said. “It’s like bullets hitting a wall. The wall starts to lose integrity over time.”
DUNE chips are designed to mitigate this effect. The chips are fabricated using large constituent devices to minimize the amount of damage accrued, and they are used at lower voltages than normally used at room temperature. Scientists can also adjust operating parameters over time to compensate for any damage that occurs during their many years of use.
Timeline to completion
With preparations for the DUNE well underway and the experiment slated to begin generating data by 2027, scientists from many institutions have been hard at work developing electronic prototypes.
Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory are working on perfecting the amplifier, while teams from Fermilab, Brookhaven and Berkeley labs are collaborating on the analog-to-digital converter design. Fermilab has also teamed up with Southern Methodist University to develop the electronic component that merges all of the data within an argon tank before it’s transmitted to electronics located outside the cold detector. Finally, researchers working on a competing design at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are trying to find a way to efficiently combine all three components into one integrated circuit.
The various teams plan to submit their circuit designs this summer for review. The selected designs will be built and ultimately installed in the DUNE neutrino detectors at the Sanford Underground Neutrino Facility in South Dakota.
U.S. work on LBNF/DUNE is supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science.
Fermilab is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.
The international Dark Energy Survey maps hundreds of millions of galaxies to deepen our understanding of the structure of the cosmos. For six years, the Dark Energy Survey imaged these celestial objects, producing a mountain of data that researchers will mine for decades to come. Below is an article from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory on how researchers from the Dark Energy Survey have discovered an important connection between the tiny galaxies surrounding the Milky Way and the dark matter halos that they inhabit.
Over the past five years, the Dark Energy Survey, a DOE-funded project led by Fermilab, has revolutionized our view of small satellite galaxies. DES discovered a large number of tiny galaxies close to the Milky Way’s largest satellites, the Magellanic Clouds, suggesting that multiple galaxies may have been captured by the Milky Way at the same time. In this recent analysis (resulting in two articles published in Astrophysical Journal), the DES group has combined observations from DES with those from the Pan-STARRS survey to cover 75% of the sky and confirm this hypothesis. In order to understand the sensitivity of these searches, the Fermilab group tested the algorithms ability to detect simulated galaxies injected into the survey data. The results of this search were then interpreted in the context of cosmological simulations to understand the connection between dark matter halos and the galaxies that reside in them. Analysis of the DES and Pan-STARRS data was led by Wilson Fellow Alex Drlica-Wagner and involved former Lederman Fellow Ting Li, Fermilab Scientist Brian Yanny, and many other collaborators from DES.
“By studying the smallest galaxies, we can better understand the fundamental physics that governs dark matter,” Drlica-Wagner said.
Image: Ralf Kaehler/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Just as the sun has planets and the planets have moons, our galaxy has satellite galaxies, and some of those might have smaller satellite galaxies of their own. To wit, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a relatively large satellite galaxy visible from the Southern Hemisphere, is thought to have brought at least six of its own satellite galaxies with it when it first approached the Milky Way, based on recent measurements from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission.
Astrophysicists believe that dark matter is responsible for much of that structure, and now researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Dark Energy Survey have drawn on observations of faint galaxies around the Milky Way to place tighter constraints on the connection between the size and structure of galaxies and the dark matter halos that surround them. At the same time, they have found more evidence for the existence of LMC satellite galaxies and made a new prediction: If the scientists’ models are correct, the Milky Way should have an additional 150 or more very faint satellite galaxies awaiting discovery by next-generation projects such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
The new study, forthcoming in the Astrophysical Journal and available as a preprint here, is part of a larger effort to understand how dark matter works on scales smaller than our galaxy, said Ethan Nadler, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) and Stanford University.
“We know some things about dark matter very well – how much dark matter is there, how does it cluster – but all of these statements are qualified by saying, yes, that is how it behaves on scales larger than the size of our local group of galaxies,” Nadler said. “And then the question is, does that work on the smallest scales we can measure?”
Shining galaxies’ light on dark matter
Astronomers have long known the Milky Way has satellite galaxies, including the Large Magellanic Cloud, which can be seen by the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere, but the number was thought to be around just a dozen or so until around the year 2000. Since then, the number of observed satellite galaxies has risen dramatically. Thanks to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and more recent discoveries by projects including the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the number of known satellite galaxies has climbed to about 60.
Such discoveries are always exciting, but what’s perhaps most exciting is what the data could tell us about the cosmos. “For the first time, we can look for these satellite galaxies across about three-quarters of the sky, and that’s really important to several different ways of learning about dark matter and galaxy formation,” said Risa Wechsler, director of KIPAC. Last year, for example, Wechsler, Nadler and colleagues used data on satellite galaxies in conjunction with computer simulations to place much tighter limits on dark matter’s interactions with ordinary matter.
Now, Wechsler, Nadler and the DES team are using data from a comprehensive search over most of the sky to ask different questions, including how much dark matter it takes to form a galaxy, how many satellite galaxies we should expect to find around the Milky Way and whether galaxies can bring their own satellites into orbit around our own – a key prediction of the most popular model of dark matter.
Hints of galactic hierarchy
The answer to that last question appears to be a resounding “yes.”
The possibility of detecting a hierarchy of satellite galaxies first arose some years back when DES detected more satellite galaxies in the vicinity of the Large Magellanic Cloud than they would have expected if those satellites were randomly distributed throughout the sky. Those observations are particularly interesting, Nadler said, in light of the Gaia measurements, which indicated that six of these satellite galaxies fell into the Milky Way with the LMC.
To study the LMC’s satellites more thoroughly, Nadler and team analyzed computer simulations of millions of possible universes. Those simulations, originally run by Yao-Yuan Mao, a former graduate student of Wechsler’s who is now at Rutgers University, model the formation of dark matter structure that permeates the Milky Way, including details such as smaller dark matter clumps within the Milky Way that are expected to host satellite galaxies. To connect dark matter to galaxy formation, the researchers used a flexible model that allows them to account for uncertainties in the current understanding of galaxy formation, including the relationship between galaxies’ brightness and the mass of dark matter clumps within which they form.
An effort led by the others in the DES team, including former KIPAC students Alex Drlica-Wagner, a Wilson Fellow at Fermilab and an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, and Keith Bechtol, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and their collaborators produced the crucial final step: a model of which satellite galaxies are most likely to be seen by current surveys, given where they are in the sky as well as their brightness, size and distance.
Those components in hand, the team ran their model with a wide range of parameters and searched for simulations in which LMC-like objects fell into the gravitational pull of a Milky Way-like galaxy. By comparing those cases with galactic observations, they could infer a range of astrophysical parameters, including how many satellite galaxies should have tagged along with the LMC. The results, Nadler said, were consistent with Gaia observations: Six satellite galaxies should currently be detected in the vicinity of the LMC, moving with roughly the right velocities and in roughly the same places as astronomers had previously observed. The simulations also suggested that the LMC first approached the Milky Way about 2.2 billion years ago, consistent with high-precision measurements of the motion of the LMC from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Galaxies yet unseen
In addition to the LMC findings, the team also put limits on the connection between dark matter halos and galaxy structure. For example, in simulations that most closely matched the history of the Milky Way and the LMC, the smallest galaxies astronomers could currently observe should have stars with a combined mass of around a hundred suns, and about a million times as much dark matter. According to an extrapolation of the model, the faintest galaxies that could ever be observed could form in halos up to a hundred times less massive than that.
And there could be more discoveries to come: If the simulations are correct, Nadler said, there are around 100 more satellite galaxies – more than double the number already discovered – hovering around the Milky Way. The discovery of those galaxies would help confirm the researchers’ model of the links between dark matter and galaxy formation, he said, and likely place tighter constraints on the nature of dark matter itself.
The research was a collaborative effort within the Dark Energy Survey, led by the Milky Way Working Group, with substantial contributions from junior members including Sidney Mau, an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, and Mitch McNanna, a graduate student at UW-Madison. The research was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science through SLAC, and by Stanford University.
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SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.