DUNE

A mile underground in South Dakota, construction crews have worked diligently to carve out an extensive network of caverns and tunnels that one day will house a huge neutrino experiment. Their efforts have paid off: With almost 400,000 tons of rock extracted from the earth, the excavation has reached the halfway point.

From the Rapid City Journal, Jan. 12, 2023: An interview with Fermilab project manager Joshua Willhite on the excavation of the caverns for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) being built under the Black Hills of South Dakota at SURF. Willhite is a mechanical engineering graduate of the South Dakota Mines university who spoke with him about his love of engineering and how the program at SD Mines led to his work on DUNE. This article is an adaptation of the South Dakota Mines story that published on Jan. 10.

From Virginia Tech, Jan. 4, 2023: Learn more about what researchers from the Virginia Tech Center for Neutrino Physics are contributing to the international DUNE collaboration. The Center is well-known for combining experimental and theoretical physics to study neutrinos as they bump into the argon inside the DUNE detector and leave behind trails of energy.

A new 20,000-pound particle detection system built for a neutrino experiment will be transported 3 miles across the Fermilab campus today. About the size of a small house, it will be the heart of the Short-Baseline Near Detector at Fermilab.

From the CERN Courier, November 7, 2022: Fermilab’s Joel Butler and a group of scientists describe the recent ‘Snowmass’ community planning exercise in Seattle, Washington which reveal the great opportunities present in high-energy physics in the coming decades.