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Neutrinos are tiny particles that may hold secrets to some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.
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The DUNE project hopes to learn more about the hard-to-study “ghost particles.”
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To do that, the neutrino beam project will be about 800 miles between Illinois and South Dakota.
Almost seven years ago, crews began hauling 800,000 tons of rock from a former gold mine near Lead, South Dakota.
The resulting three underground caverns are 500 feet long and nearly tall enough to hold a seven-story building.
Estimated to cost at least $3 billion, the DUNE project (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment), is being led by scientists at the US Department of Energy. Fermilab.
Eventually, each cavity will contain 17,500 tons of liquid argon to help Fermilab physicists detect elusive particles called neutrinos, aka “ghost particles.”
Neutrinos are sub-atomic particles all around you, passing right by you, unnoticed. The sun creates them; make them supernova; Bananas even produce neutrinos.
“If you hold your hand up, 10 billion neutrinos from the sun are going through your hand,” physicist Mary Bishai and DUNE spokesperson told Business Insider every second.
Neutrinos are known as ghost particles because they have no electrical charge and therefore rarely interact with anything they come in contact with.
This makes them extremely difficult to study, but scientists still hope that neutrinos could hold the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe, from what happened just after the Big Bang to until the birth of a black hole.
Neutrino beam between Illinois and South Dakota
It is difficult to study a particle that does not emit radiation and is lighter than an electron. “Neutrino interactions are almost needles in a haystack,” Bishai said.
And Fermilab scientists are trying to study neutrinos in detail, as never seen before, with DUNE.
That’s why DUNE will have the largest neutrino detectors of their kind ever built.
Once the experiment is complete, it is designed to start a series of particle accelerators at Fermilab outside Chicago, Illinois.
The accelerators will first shoot an extremely powerful beam of neutrinos through a detector at Fermilab. The beam will then travel underground for 800 miles to the detectors at the South Dakota Sanford Underground Research Facility.
In this way, the neutrinos will do something strange. There are three types of neutrinos, and the particles can switch back and forth between them, a phenomenon known as oscillation. One Fermilab scientist compared it to a house cat transforming into a jaguar and then a tiger before returning to its original form.
Tracking how the neutrinos change over long distances from Illinois to South Dakota will help scientists better understand these oscillations by giving them a more complete view than Fermilab’s 500-mile experiment present between Illinois and Minnesota.
Doing all of this a mile underground protects the sensitive oscillating particles from energetic cosmic rays that shower the Earth’s surface every second and could disrupt the data.
Solve the mysteries of the universe
Scientists hope to answer three main questions with DUNE: why is the universe made of matter instead of antimatter, what happens when a star collapses, and protons decay?
“Right after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter were created almost identically,” Bishai said. But today, from what scientists can tell, the universe is made almost entirely of matter.
“Why did we end up with a matter universe, not an antimatter universe?” on her.
The DUNE beam is designed to create both neutrinos and anions — the antimatter version. Looking at the oscillations in each form might help scientists figure out what happened to all the antimatter.
The project is also underway for supernova physics, Bishai said.
In 1987, astronomers saw a bright supernova exploding closer than anyone had in about 400 years. When the detectors were in operation at the time, they were only able to detect a few dozen neutrinos.
There’s a 40% chance another nearby star will explode in the next decade, Bishai said, and Fermilab hopes at least one of its South Dakota detectors will be up and running in time.
Such a large detector could capture thousands of neutrinos and provide insights into how both black holes and neutron stars form.
Finally, scientists have yet to see protons decaying, but theory predicts that they should. Protons are tiny, positively charged particles that form part of an atom’s nucleus.
Observing proton decay would have implications for Albert Einstein’s belief that a single theory could unify all the forces in nature.
If protons decay, it would take about 10 billion, trillion, trillion years. But neutrino detectors can look for different signatures of proton decay, Bishai said. “We would have a chance to see them, if these grand unifying theories are correct.”
An ambitious project
A number of neutrino projects are currently underway around the world, including at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) and at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
What makes DUNE unique is the use of argon and the long distance between its near and far detectors.
The project had some budget and timeline constraints, Scientific American reported in 2022. It is supposed to have four argon detectors but will start with two.
The first could be up and running by the end of 2028, Bishai said, and the second detector after next year. Those will be in place in case of a supernova explosion, but the beams won’t be ready until 2031.
That said, Bishai thinks the project has already achieved one of its biggest achievements, a collaboration of around 1,400 people from 36 countries. “It’s a big science,” she said. “It is also a big international science.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
