On Wednesday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook Live from a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, future home of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.
As of the date of this post, more than 2 million people have viewed Zuckerberg’s Facebook Live video, which discusses DUNE, neutrinos and the search for dark matter. Fermilab even gets a shout-out about 4 minutes in (3:55).
Watch Zuckerberg’s video for a glimpse of the DUNE host facility and to learn a little more about our research partners at Sanford Lab.
Ron Walker, left and Bill Fowler stand near the site of the groundbreaking for the liquid-helium plant. Photo: Fermilab
Way back when, I was in the Materials Supply Group, I was in charge of looking through lists of equipment that laboratories and government facilities had placed in excess — things they no longer needed — and that could be transferred to another laboratory.
I had heard through my boss Norm Hill and other higher-ups that they were looking for a liquid-helium plant. They needed it to cool the magnets in the Main Ring and to do their experiments for the future Energy Doubler. So I was looking and, lo and behold, I came across an air separation plant. It was thousands and thousands of dollars. We acquired the Worthington reciprocating compressors that were used in the plant.
We worked it out with Norm Hill and Jack Jaeger, the directorate approved it, and it was all free of charge. All we had to do was pay the shipping. It was a pretty huge acquisition. It was from a facility in California.
The compressors arrived in pieces on big flatbed trucks — huge trailer-type vehicles.
People were so happy to get it free of charge. I saved the lab mega bucks.
You can read about the liquid-helium plant in the Dec. 11, 1975, issue of FermiNews, page 1.
VENu lets you view real tracks left in the MicroBooNE neutrino detector. Image courtesy of Marco Del Tutto
What happens when tiny, invisible particles called neutrinos are sent hurtling through a tank of liquid argon? For most of the neutrinos, not much. They’ll pass through the argon unscathed. But other neutrinos will collide with argon molecules, leaving behind tracks — proof they were there.
These kinds of collisions take place inside Fermilab’s MicroBooNE neutrino detector. Now, with the help of VENu, a free smartphone app, users can dive into MicroBooNE’s 170-ton tank of liquid argon and see neutrino tracks for themselves.
“The primary goal of the VENu app is to get more people involved in particle physics, especially in neutrino physics,” said Marco Del Tutto, the app’s primary developer from Oxford University who works on the MicroBooNE experiment. “The app enables users to immerse themselves inside our particle detector and to see with their own eyes the particles that interact in it.”
VENu uses real data collected by the MicroBooNE neutrino detector, modeled in a 3-D environment to create an interactive neutrino-hunting experience. A game mode helps users understand what’s happening in the detector — what’s going on when a neutrino interacts with argon? — and then lets them catch the neutrino interactions themselves. VENu can also be used with any virtual-reality headset for an even more immersive experience.
VENu is compatible with personal virtual-reality devices, allowing for a portable, immersive experience. Photo courtesy of Marco Del Tutto
The development of VENu started in 2014, as the MicroBooNE team prepared to bring the detector online.
“We had been thinking about new ways to show off the MicroBooNE experiment. MicroBooNE is an innovative technology, and we wanted an innovative way to show it off,” said Sam Zeller, co-spokesperson of the MicroBooNE experiment.
Alistair McLean, a student from New Mexico State University, was the first to create a virtual model of the MicroBooNE detector, forming an important platform for a new way to visualize particle physics.
Del Tutto took VENu’s design a step further to make it more accessible for everyone.
“Many people hear ‘particle physics’ and think it’s too secretive and too hard for them to understand,” Del Tutto said. “An app looked like the perfect product, as it shares what we are doing, who we are, and shows real data, all in a simple and intuitive way.”
MicroBooNE isn’t the only particle physics experiment to have an app — Del Tutto is also a part of the team that made Collider, an app for the ATLAS experiment at CERN laboratory in Switzerland — but VENu is uniquely engaging.
“There aren’t many apps out there that combine real particle events and visualizations, learning sections and games to engage the public,” Del Tutto said.
In the future, Del Tutto plans to add visualizations of more detectors to the app, including ICARUS, a much larger neutrino detector than MicroBooNE. ICARUS is currently on its way to Fermilab from CERN. But for now, VENu will continue to showcase the MicroBooNE detector.
Zeller said, “We are very proud of where VENu started, what it has become and the possibility to show off MicroBooNE in a completely new way.”
This two-dimensional event display shows the raw signal (a) before and (b) after offline noise filtering. Clean event signatures were recovered once all excess noise was removed.
If you have ever tried to watch a movie or listen to music on a plane, then you know the problem well: The roar of the engines makes it difficult to hear what’s being piped through the speakers — even when those speakers are situated in or on your ear. It’s great that we have noise-canceling headphones that can provide a more enjoyable listening experience. High-frequency sound waves are filtered because of the very structure of the headphone. Low-frequency sound waves are filtered by a process called destructive interference: The headphone’s sound waves are created 180 degrees out of phase with the intruding waves — those of the airplane engines — and the two waves cancel each other out. As a result, the listener can focus on the sounds he or she wants to hear.
In a similar manner, at the MicroBooNE detector we identify and filter out several excess noise sources at both high and lower frequencies. The primary component of the MicroBooNE detector is the liquid-argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) — a large, horizontal-silo-like vessel filled with liquid argon. Scientists make measurements of the particles that result from the collision of a neutrino with an argon nucleus. These particles leave in the argon a trail of electrons, which drift toward two planes of wires —8,256 of them — in the LArTPC. That information travels as current through the wires, and researchers use the information to learn more about the neutrino that triggered it.
The current on each wire is amplified and shaped by custom low-power, low-noise circuits immersed in the liquid argon. The low-noise operation of readout electronics in a LArTPC is critical to properly extract the distribution of charge deposited on the wire planes of the TPC. Using data from the first year of MicroBooNE operations, researchers identified several distinct types of TPC noise, which exceeded expectations for the types of noise inherent to the electronics.
With the support from the entire collaboration, the analysis team developed an offline noise filter that eliminates most of the excess noise while achieving excellent signal preservation. The resulting two-dimensional event display for a signal from one data event is shown in the figure both before (panel (a)) and after (panel (b)) offline noise filtering. The team recovered clean event signatures after subtracting all identified noise sources. The residual electronics noise is consistent with the cold electronics design expectations and is stable with time and uniform over the functioning channels. This noise level is significantly lower than previous experiments that used warm front-end electronics.
In summer of 2016, the collaboration additionally performed several hardware upgrades, with new components from Brookhaven National Laboratory and technical support from Fermilab, to mitigate the two largest sources of excess noise. After the successful upgrade, the residual excess noise was largely removed. This result has been submitted to the Journal of Instrumentation and can be found on arXiv.
In a talk on the topic, Jyoti Joshi of Brookhaven, one of the papers co-authors, noted that the experience accumulated during the first year of data taking proved to be critical in the optimization and operation of the MicroBooNE TPC and is already proving useful in informing the design of future LArTPC detectors. There will be a wine and cheese seminar at Fermilab covering the first year of MicroBooNE operations on July 28, so come learn all about it.
If in a few years you happen to travel down Highway 85 in the Black Hills near Lead, South Dakota, you will find yourself passing beneath a new, narrow beam-like structure stretching across the road overhead.
You’ll be crossing under part of a conveyor system that will be used to transport rock from nearly a mile underground at the former Homestake gold mine — now the Sanford Underground Research Facility — to an enormous open pit on the surface as underground space is carved out to house a giant particle detector.
Scientists from the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), an experiment hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, will build and use the mammoth detector to study particles called neutrinos. Understanding these particles is expected to lead to a deeper knowledge of how our universe is put together.
The North Alabama Fabricating Company has been contracted to design and fabricate a rock conveyor to help remove rock from the former Homestake Mine. This effort is to make way for a giant particle detector for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. The detector will be situated nearly a mile underground. Image: Sanford Lab
On June 28, Fermi Research Alliance LLC, which operates Fermilab, signed a contract with North Alabama Fabricating Company to design and fabricate the pipe conveyor to be installed at Sanford Lab. The contract supports the excavation for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF), the facility that will house and support DUNE.
“The fabrication and installation of the pipe conveyor will be a major step toward LBNF excavation,” said Mike Headley, executive director of the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority, or SDSTA, which owns and operates Sanford Lab. “It’s an exciting milestone, and the SDSTA is proud to support the LBNF team on this project.”
Fermilab and Sanford Lab staff expect conveyor installation to begin in mid-2018 and continue for six months. Rock removal is expected to take about three years once the conveyor begins operating.
The rock conveyor will transport rock excavated from the former Homestake Mine to a nearby open cut. Image: Sanford Lab
“The conveyor will transport about 800,000 tons of rock — approximately equal to the mass of eight Nimitz class aircraft carriers,” said retired U.S. Navy admiral Chris Mossey, who is now the LBNF project director at Fermilab.
Like a giant futuristic supermarket checkout lane, the rock conveyor will move rock over a stretch of 3,700 feet while containing dust and debris.
The conveyor path will take advantage of a long, existing tunnel carved out during Homestake’s gold mining days in the 1930s. The conveyor will start 175 feet underground, make its way to the surface, and continue high above ground until it arrives at the pit, called an open cut, which is roughly two miles wide and 1,200 feet deep. In fact, miners used a similar machine in the 1980s to transport rock away from the open cut as they looked for gold.
This is a conceptual illustration of the aboveground portion of the rock conveyor. Image: Sanford Lab
LBNF project members have kept in close contact with the city of Lead and its residents regarding rock-handling options, as well as with the State Historic Preservation Office to ensure that cultural aspects of the site are understood and respected. The communication will continue as the design evolves.
“The design team has worked hard to come up with the right system,” said Fermilab’s Elaine McCluskey, LBNF project manager.
Excavation for the DUNE detector caverns is expected to be complete in early 2022.
Editor’s note: The amount of rock to be excavated for LBNF at the South Dakota site mentioned in this article was updated on May 2, 2019.
July brought Fermilab three new directors, two discovery announcements and one big, red ring. Read on for more July historical milestones.
In July 1989, John Peoples replaced Leon Lederman as Fermilab’s director. Peoples had joined the lab in 1971. He served as head of the Research Division and the Accelerator Division and oversaw the Antiproton Source, a key part of the Tevatron.
On July 1, 1999, Michael Witherell became Fermilab’s fourth director. He had worked at Fermilab on an experiment studying charm quarks in the 1980s and was a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, when he accepted the Fermilab directorship.
Pier Oddone became Fermilab’s fifth director on July 1, 2005. Originally from Peru, he was serving as deputy director at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab when he became Fermilab’s director and won the 2005 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in experimental particle physics.
The lab celebrates surpassing 500 GeV with director Leon Lederman.
The Tevatron surpassed its design energy of 500 GeV within 13 hours of the first attempt to accelerate the beam. It reached a world record proton beam energy of 512 GeV on July 3, 1983.
Both the CMS (pictured here) and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson.
On July 4, 2012, scientists with CERN’s CMS and ATLAS experiments announced the discovery of the Higgs Boson, a particle that had been predicted by theorists and is responsible for giving other particles mass. Fermilab plays a significant role in the CMS experiment, and many Fermilab scientists contributed to the discovery.
The MINOS beamline goes from Fermilab to Minnesota.
MINOS, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search, was Fermilab’s first long-baseline neutrino experiment. It was designed to observe the phenomenon of neutrino oscillations, an effect that is related to neutrino mass. The groundbreaking for the MINOS detector hall in the Soudan Mine near Tower, Minnesota, was held on July 20, 1999, marking the beginning of the lab’s transition from the Tevatron era to the neutrino era.
Byron Lundberg and Regina Rameika worked on the DONUT experiment.
The Fermilab DONUT collaboration, which recorded data with a Tevatron fixed-target experiment in 1997, announced the first direct evidence for the tau neutrino on July 21, 2000.
The arrival of the Muon g-2 ring made a splash when it arrived at Fermilab from Brookhaven.
Fermilab and Brookhaven National Laboratory transported a 50-foot-wide particle storage ring from Brookhaven in Long Island, New York, to Fermilab so it could be reused in Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment. The move began on June 22, and the ring traversed over 3,200 miles of land and water on its 35-day journey. About 3,000 people came to Fermilab on July 26, 2013, to watch it arrive.