Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment

The international LBNF/DUNE team with its partners recently tested the logistics of shipping and handling the large detector components that will make up the far-site detector of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. On Wednesday, Nov. 2, personnel at the Sanford Underground Research Facility successfully lowered a 25-foot-long detector component for DUNE a mile underground. This was a full-scale prototype assembled and tested in Europe, then shipped from CERN to South Dakota. DUNE will ship about 150 of these components to South Dakota to build the first neutrino detector module of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

From Innovation News Network, February 25, 2022: PIP-II project director Lia Merminga discusses the Fermilab accelerator complex upgrade being done in collaboration with research institutions in India, the UK, Italy, France, and Poland. Read more about the current status of PIP-II project, what it sets out to achieve and the impacts PIP-II will have on the future of particle physics research.

CERN deepens its collaboration with the US-based neutrino experiment with the provision of two enormous stainless-steel vessels for DUNE’s cutting-edge liquid-argon detectors.

Two crew members stand with the drill underground.

Construction crews will excavate around 800,000 tons of rock to make space for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. But first, teams must carve out a quarter-mile-high ventilation shaft.

Three factoid cards, which look similar to playing cards or a baseball card, appear on a background of stars in a night sky (or in outer space) in a cartoon rendering. On each of the cards is a circle adjusted its sunglasses, presumably each a type of neutrino. Underneath these images on the cards are scribbles representing text and a question mark. In the upper left corner, the abbreviations for electron neutrino, a muon neutrino or a tau neutrino appear.

Figuring out which type of neutrino is heaviest, or solving the puzzle of neutrino mass hierarchy, would be a huge leap in our understanding of both neutrinos and the physics that govern our universe. The NoVA experiment or DUNE could help physicists do just that.