South Dakota

From the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 9, 2019: The international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, will start running in 2026, studying an intense beam of neutrinos that starts at Fermilab and that will be measured in underground caverns in Lead, South Dakota. Fermilab scientists Deborah Harris and Sam Zeller talk about the mysteries of neutrinos and how DUNE will address them in this in depth article.

From Kelo, July 19, 2019: Fermilab’s Patrick Weber and others talk about the international, Fermilab-hosted Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment and its Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility in this 8-minute video. Sanford Underground Research Facility is home to the DUNE far detector, and the world-leading research taking place at there is giving scientists from a variety of disciplines a wealth of information about the universe, the geology of the region and life underground.

From Kelo, July 10, 2019: Fermilab’s Bonnie Fleming talks about neutrinos, the international, Fermilab-hosted DUNE and and LBNF in this 9-minute video on the research taking place one mile underground in Lead, South Dakota, at the Sanford Underground Research Facility.

From Rapid City Journal, July 12, 2019: Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer was the guest for a free public speaker series held one day prior to Neutrino Day, a full day of neutrino-themed public activities in Lead. Lockyer spoke about is known as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), housed in the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF), which will have its South Dakota component at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in the former Homestake mine. It’s a billion-dollar international collaboration, and it’s described as the largest particle physics project ever built in the United States.

From KOTA TV, May 20, 2019: Fermilab’s Patrick Weber and Sanford Lab’s Mike Headley talk with the South Dakota news program about the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment and the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility in this 3-minute segment.

From Construction Equipment Guide, May 15, 2019: Fermilab’s Chris Mossey and Doug Pelletier talk about the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, and the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, much of which will be built in the extensive maze of caverns at the former Homestake gold mine in South Dakota’s beautiful Black Hills. The site is being transformed into a laboratory designed to unlock the mysteries of some of the smallest particles in the universe, neutrinos.

From DOE’s Direct Current podcast, May 7, 2019: This episode of Direct Current takes a subatomic sojourn into the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, a massive international research project aiming to unlock the secrets of the neutrino with help from more than 175 institutions in over 30 countries. Join Fermilab’s Chris Mossey, Bonnie Fleming and Lia Merminga and DUNE collaborator Christos Touramanis on a tour from Fermilab to CERN to the bottom of a former gold mine a mile beneath the hills of South Dakota.

Excavating about 800,000 tons of rock a mile underground, bringing it to the surface, and then transporting it to its final resting place is a huge job and part of the LBNF/DUNE project. Creating the infrastructure for that job is a huge amount of work by itself and is going on right now.

From Discover, March 12, 2019: Fermilab, along with the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, is starting a new project called the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE. The goal is to track and study shadowy neutrinos like never before. Fermilab scientists Deborah Harris and Angela Fava discuss the experiment.

Physicists often find thrifty, ingenious ways to reuse equipment and resources. What do you do about an 800-ton magnet originally used to discover new particles? Send it off on a months-long journey via truck, train and ship halfway across the world to detect oscillating particles called neutrinos, of course. It’s all part of the vast recycling network of the physics community.