An international project to build the largest physics experiment ever constructed in the United States took a major step forward as a new phase of work has begun at the project’s South Dakota site.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has finalized an agreement with construction firm Kiewit-Alberici Joint Venture (KAJV) to start pre-excavation work for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF), which will house the enormous particle detectors for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). The South Dakota portion of the facility will be built a mile beneath the surface at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota.
The contract with KAJV covers the next two years and includes everything that will be needed to support the next phase of work — the fast, safe and continuous removal of approximately 800,000 tons of rock to create the large caverns that will house the massive DUNE detector modules.
“After years of design and planning, it’s gratifying to put boots on the ground and begin this pre-excavation work,” said Chris Mossey, Fermilab’s deputy director for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility. “Getting to this point has been the result of a lot of work from the entire LBNF/DUNE team and our partners at KAJV, Arup, Sanford Lab and DOE, and we’re all ready for this next phase of the project to begin.”
In the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, a beam of neutrinos will be sent from Fermilab outside Chicago straight through Earth’s mantle to Sanford Lab in Lead, South Dakota. Fermilab recently finalized an agreement with construction firm Kiewit-Alberici Joint Venture to start pre-excavation work for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, which will house the detectors.
Included in the work is restoring and refurbishing rock-crushing equipment once used for the gold mine where Sanford Lab now resides and outfitting one of the mine shafts to carry loads of crushed rock. Much of the early pre-excavation work will take place underground at Sanford Lab or inside existing enclosures on site.
“Complicated tunneling, excavation and underground construction is what we do every day, but performing this work in support of a groundbreaking, international science experiment is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Scott Lundgren, spokesperson for Kiewit/Alberici Joint Venture. “We are proud to be a part of this historic project and look forward to helping to make the vision for the LBNF become a reality.”
Fermilab and Sanford Lab will host an informational meeting in Lead, South Dakota, for local residents on Jan. 16, 2019, to answer questions about the construction of the project. The meeting will take place at 7 p.m. in the Education and Outreach Building at Sanford Lab. For more information, visit the event page.
DUNE, hosted by Fermilab, will be the world’s most advanced experiment dedicated to studying the properties of mysterious subatomic particles called neutrinos. Scientists are seeking to understand the role neutrinos played in the formation of our universe, and the DUNE detectors will enable them to study a beam of particles generated by an upgraded accelerator complex at Fermilab. The DUNE collaboration includes more than 1,000 scientists from more than 30 countries around the world. A large prototype detector for the experiment, constructed at the European research center CERN, successfully began recording particle tracks in September of this year.
For more information on LBNF/DUNE, see http://www.fnal.gov/dune.
Over the course of this year, the Fermilab Archives will present a rotating exhibit of the history of physics in print. The exhibit can be viewed in the glass display case in the Fermilab Art Gallery, which is located on the second floor of Fermilab’s Wilson Hall. The gallery is open to the public Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
This display is part of a series of exhibits organized by Fermilab scientist Erik Ramberg and the Fermilab Archives. These exhibits will feature influential works in the history of physics loaned from Ramberg’s private collection. Each display will consist of several volumes illustrating a common theme in the evolution of physics and will rotate approximately once a month.
The first exhibit, currently showing, is titled “The Early Scientific Journals” and features works from the 17th and 18th centuries. It will be on display until February.
Today, the most common way for scientists to communicate new findings to their colleagues is by publishing articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The contemporary conventions of scientific publishing developed over the course of several centuries. They trace their origins back to 1665, when two groups began, nearly simultaneously, publishing periodicals devoted to science and society.
The first European journal was called Journal des Scavans and began publishing on Jan. 5, 1665. Two printings were produced in Paris and in Amsterdam. Following close behind, the secretary of The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge published the first issue of Philosophical Transactions, England’s first scientific journal, on March 6, 1665.
The exhibit also includes examples of Acta Eruditorum and The Gentleman’s Magazine, which began publication in 1682 and 1731, respectively.
If you have questions, please contact archivist Valerie Higgins or scientist and collection curator Erik Ramberg.
Visit the display case in the Fermilab Art Gallery to view scientific journals from the 17th and 18th centuries. Photo: Valerie Higgins
A miniaturized technology originally developed for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva now is available for applications in maritime safety and homeland security.
This technology — silicon strip cosmic-muon detectors — has earned an R&D 100 Award for a team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory — its 14th since 1980 — and its partners in the project, the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) and the DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The award-winning detectors were modified from silicon detector technology that high-energy physicists have used for years.
“It’s like a natural X-ray machine,” said Fermilab scientist Ron Lipton, who led the team that designed, mounted, assembled and tested the sensors. “It’s a synergistic use of what we’ve been doing already. We were able to use some of the engineering expertise here at the site to build these detectors.”
R&D 100 awards are presented annually by R&D Magazine in recognition of exceptional new products or processes that were developed during the previous year. An independent panel of judges selects the awardees based on the technical significance, uniqueness, and usefulness of projects and technology from across industry, government, and academia.
Silicon strip detectors like these are thin and lightweight, allowing them to be portable and easily embedded in structures. Photo: Mission Support and Test Services LLC
Cosmic-ray muons rain continuously upon Earth, produced when charged particles from deep space strike the upper atmosphere. Approximately 10,000 muons per minute per square meter arrive at sea level. This shower of subatomic particles passes unnoticed through all kinds of objects. Unlike X-rays, they even can traverse steel and other solid materials. And when captured by detectors placed behind or underneath an object, these muons can reveal what is inside.
Muons have been used to produce tomographic images of the interior of pyramids in Egypt and of nuclear reactors at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, which was heavily damaged by earthquakes and an ensuing tsunami in 2011. Radiation detectors and X-ray scanners are unable to penetrate materials concealed in concrete, lead and other materials, but muons can.
The technology may lend itself to additional applications that call for remote viewing of hazardous materials, Lipton said. These include verifying how much material is contained in concrete fuel casks, for example.
Leading the muon detector project was J. Andrew Green, principal scientist for the NNSS’ Remote Sensing Laboratory at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada. Green had conducted research at Fermilab’s DZero experiment from 1997 to 2001 as a doctoral student at Iowa State University. During that period, Green met Lipton, Mike Utes, Cristian Gingu, Johnny B. Green and Paul Rubinov, who, along with William Cooper, composed the award-winning project team.
Andrew Green had worked with Utes and John Green on a key component of an upgrade to the DZero detector.
“From that experience, I knew who to call when I had my idea to build a silicon-based tracking system,” said Andrew Green, who later also worked as a postdoctoral scientist on the MiniBooNE neutrino experiment at Fermilab.
Green wrote the analysis software for reading the muon detector system’s data files, performing diagnostics and plotting muon signals in the detector in three dimensions.
“Even projects of this small scale require good software development to properly organize the large number of channels, data types and associated geometry,” he explained.
Fermilab’s cosmic-muon detector work is an outgrowth of its experience in building many tens of square yards of silicon sensors for the CMS experiment. The sensors the team developed for homeland security applications cover only a few square feet and are built in four planes that come in packages two inches thick.
Drift-tube detectors are currently used for position-sensitive particle detection in homeland security applications. Their thickness and weight cause problems for storage, shipment and deployment. Lightweight silicon strip detectors, meanwhile, are easily handled by humans or robots, and their precision dramatically reduces tracking and calibration software requirements. Image: Mission Support and Test Services LLC
They could potentially replace the bulky drift tube detectors in current use, which are two feet thick. The latter’s size and weight make them more difficult to ship and deploy. Their larger bulk is needed to boost the lower resolution of the muons passing through them as compared to the silicon strip technology, which can be used in thin layers. The conventional drift tube technology also presents potential hazards because it depends upon sets of cylindrical tubes that are filled with flammable gas and charged to high voltage to boost the signal.
Lipton, who specializes in silicon tracker detectors, led the construction of several silicon-based muon detectors for the DZero experiment, which finished data collection in 2011. He and his associates now are building a large-area silicon system for the Large Hadron Collider, which uses stacked planes of similar detectors in a somewhat different geometry.
“These are hundreds of square meters of material,” Lipton said. “They’re unprecedented in scale.”
Funding for silicon strip muon detectors for homeland security was provided by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Laboratory-Directed Research and Development and Site-Directed Research and Development programs.