There’s a multi-billion dollar mega project going on at Fermilab near Batavia Illinois and it’s driving a lot of interest in the area. Below is a summary of the project along with a video reviewing it.
Introduction to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE)
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), a multi-decade initiative involving over 1,000 scientists globally. It is described as a project of “utmost importance” and the “single highest priority” of an entire branch of the scientific community. The DUNE project aims to explain the very nature of our universe, but is currently behind schedule and over budget.
Understanding Neutrinos
The core of the DUNE experiment is the neutrino, an “elementary particle” that is a fundamental building block of matter. Neutrinos have an infinitesimally tiny mass, so small it was once thought to be zero. They are electrically neutral and interact with gravity and the weak nuclear force, but their interactions are so rare that a single neutrino can “fly through a light year of lead without hitting anything”. Neutrinos are emitted by sources like the fusion reactions in stars, radioactive decay, and cosmic rays. Hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions, pass through your body every second.
The Importance of DUNE and Neutrino Research
The DUNE experiment seeks to address fundamental questions in physics. According to the standard model, neutrinos should not have mass, which they do. They may also be able to travel faster than the speed of light by passing into other dimensions. Neutrinos are believed to hold the key to why the universe is made of matter rather than antimatter, and why antimatter particles seemed to disappear after the Big Bang. The DUNE project aims to concretely measure the mass and oscillation rates of different types of neutrinos, which could upend or refine the standard model and help us understand the origins of the universe.
The DUNE Project Design and Function
DUNE is not a single location but is built at two sites 1,300 km (800 miles) apart in the United States. The “sending location” is at Fermilab near Chicago, where a particle accelerator will generate a focused beam of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. The beam will travel westward through 1,300 km of solid rock to the “receiving detector” located at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota, the deepest underground laboratory in the US.
The experiment is designed to observe neutrino oscillation, a phenomenon where a neutrino changes its “flavor” or state as it travels over a distance. Anti-neutrinos also oscillate but at a different, slower rate. The core goal of DUNE is to measure the difference in oscillation rates between neutrinos and anti-neutrinos.
At Fermilab, a 2.4-megawatt proton beam will create pions and kaons, which will then decay into a neutrino beam. A “near detector” at the Fermilab site will measure the number and flavor of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos being created. This data will be compared to what is observed at the far detector.
The far detector in South Dakota is the most impressive piece of engineering. It is a “liquid argon time projection chamber” that will use 70 metric kilotons of liquid argon (154 million pounds) buried 1.5 km (nearly 5,000 feet) underground. The detector will be housed in massive caverns carved from 725,000 metric tons of rock, an area the size of eight football fields. The job of this detector is to be continuously bombarded by the neutrino beam, occasionally allowing a neutrino to interact with the liquid argon and produce a measurable signal. The data from these rare interactions will be used to determine the neutrino’s mass and flavor. With 2.3 decillion atoms in the liquid argon, even a rare interaction will occur nearly constantly from a human perspective.
Project Status, Costs, and Competition
The DUNE project is not expected to be operational for active research until the early 2030s. The project has suffered from significant delays and cost overruns. Phase one, which includes two far detectors, a scaled-back near detector, and a 1.2-megawatt neutrino beam, is now projected to cost over $3 billion and be operational in 2032, nearly a decade behind the original 2024 target. Phase two is expected to cost close to a billion dollars more.DUNE faces competition from other projects, most notably Hyper-K in Japan. Hyper-K’s apparatus is on schedule and on budget, and is a full five years ahead of DUNE. While Hyper-K’s neutrino beam travels a shorter distance (295 km), its larger detector and higher interaction rate are expected to make up for it.
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