Senator John Thune of South Dakota has worked for decades to help convert an abandoned gold mine in South Dakota into the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

The new memorandum of understanding will elevate the collaboration between the Spanish Ministry of Science and Fermilab in developing detection systems and the physics of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. DUNE is an international science project that will seek to determine whether neutrinos could be the reason the universe is made of matter.

Journalists were recently invited to tour JUNO, a $300 million science facility designed to measure neutrinos. The U.S.-based DUNE project will also measure neutrinos. If JUNO explains the story of neutrino masses before DUNE comes online, the Fermilab-led project would then be able to measure the question differently and confirm JUNO’s results.

The UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) awarded Lancaster University £928,000 for the DUNE Anode Plane Assemblies project and £901,000 for the DUNE Reconstruction Software and Distributed Computing initiative. These projects form part of a wider UK DUNE collaboration that is providing significant effort in areas key to the success of the DUNE project.

A successful test delivers DUNE steel beam a mile underground at Sanford Underground Research Lab in Lead, South Dakota.

Faculty and students in the Experimental Neutrino Physics group at Syracuse University are working on DUNE detector construction, operation and analysis. This includes collaboration work on the the 2×2 prototype, a new prototype “pixel” Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber detector and the Short-Baseline Near Detector.

The 2×2 detector has captured its first neutrino interactions at Fermilab with help from scientists at SLAC. The prototype neutrino detector will help fine-tune a full-size version of the DUNE Near Detector Liquid Argon detector and will capture up to 10,000 neutrino interactions per day.

South Dakota Senator Lee Schoenbeck recently visited the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, South Dakota, and shared his experiences and insights into the groundbreaking research.

DUNE is designed to detect the Universe’s most antisocial particle: the neutrino.

Two colossal caverns, each more than 500 feet long and seven-stories tall, were completed to contain the gigantic particle detector modules for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility/Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, an international collaboration led by Fermilab. A third cavern will house utilities for operation of the DUNE far detector.