detector

Crews stay busy with construction at SURF

As excavation of the underground facilities for DUNE nears completion, crews are now working on laying concrete floors and spraying shotcrete on the walls of the caverns. The next priority is to prepare the south cavern for cryostat erection by installing sprinklers, fire alarms, an elevator, and overhead cranes

Practice makes perfect – SURF rigging crews test wooden model L-beam

Rigging crews at SURF are performing a series of tests using a large wooden model L-beam built to the same scale as one of the huge steel components that arrived in South Dakota in January after being shipped from Spain. The tests are being done in anticipation of lowering the real thing down the shaft to the underground 4850 level.

UTA preps giant particle detectors for neutrino project

Physicists at the University of Texas at Arlington are building portions of the first two detectors for DUNE that will be installed underground in South Dakota. The UTA team will construct 100 modules for the first detector and all 200 of the modules for the second detector.

Excavation of massive caverns for Fermilab’s DUNE detector completed

Physicists from the University of Texas at Arlington will build portions of the first two far detectors to be installed at the South Dakota site fro DUNE. Having been part of the collaboration since its earliest stages, UTA physicists also assisted in the construction of prototype detectors at CERN.

Massive caverns for DUNE neutrino project nearly excavated

The major part of the excavation of the caverns for the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility at SURF is nearing completion. The caverns will house the very large detectors for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment in Lead, South Dakota.

From Popular Science: A new observatory under construction in China—the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory, or JUNO—plans to hunt the elusive neutrino with better sensitivity than ever before. Expected to be operational in 2024, this detector will not only be bigger, but also more sensitive to slight variations in neutrinos’ energies than any of its predecessors.

From Unicamp (upon opening the link, right click to translate to English): Last week, directors and scientists from Unicamp (the University of Campinas) and other research institutions visited Fermilab as part of the critical assessment by DOE on the progress of the international collaboration in building the large underground neutrino detector at LBNF. The University is responsible for the development and subsequent production of two sets of central equipment that will make up the laboratory to be installed in South Dakota 1,500 meters underground. One of the sets will be used to detect photons and the other to purify liquid argon.

Plans are moving ahead for the liquid nitrogen refrigeration system which will use liquid nitrogen to cool the 17,500 tons of liquid argon that will fill the neutrino detectors at the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility in the Sanford Lab. The system is expected to be built by 2026, and operational underground by the end of 2026 to support the installation of some detector elements, and the operations of the full facility starting in early 2028.