atom physics is seldom a cheap - and - sluttish attempt . Just think about the Large Hadron Collider , buried deep beneath the Swiss - French borderline — it costover 13 billion dollarsto detect the Higgs Boson . Well , todayat 4:20PM(nice ) , America is breaking ground on another enormous molecule physics experiment .
DUNE , or the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment , is intend to study the properties of neutrino , lighter ( but not massless ) particles that are both extremely vulgar and extremely hard to detect . The experimentation consists of two constituent , which will hit the particles 810 air mile from Fermilab in Illinois to the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota . It ’s not the first American neutrino experiment — there are science lab deeply underground in a Minnesota and South Dakotan mine ( adjacent to where this experiment will be ) . But it will be the largest melted argon demodulator ever built .
Construction is only beginning on the experiment , but its issue will be in truth monumental : four container halt a combined68,000 tonsof liquified atomic number 18 cooled to disconfirming 300 degree Fahrenheit , almost a sea mile underground . Neutrinos interact implausibly weakly ( they do n’t interact with the Earth or your soundbox , for representative ) and necessitate these sensitive detectors to blemish . Essentially , neutrino from the origin in Illinois will hit the liquid state Ar , knock off negatron that stray into sensors on the container ’s edges thanks to the presence of an electric subject area — the detector show these negatron as a signal . But that sensitivity means the researchers might also pick up false hits from other corpuscle issue forth from space , which is why the sensor need to be so deeply buried .
DUNE prototypes at CERN (Image: Ryan F. Mandelbaum)
And 68,000 net ton containers are really immense . While at CERN this past April , researcher Stefania Bordoni showed me the DUNE prototypes , each of which will check only770 metric tonsof Ar . At 25 or so feet tall , each regular hexahedron , checkered with a red metal ray of light lattice , looked like a shipping crate for a T. male monarch .
There are a few goals of the experimentation , but a major one is to well understand a unusual effect called neutrino oscillation . neutrino hail in three tone with different masses : the lite electron neutrino , the negative muon neutrino , and the heavy tau neutrino . But neutrino can also switch between these province in a outgrowth called neutrino cycle . data-based discovery of this effect won two experiments the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics .
Understanding neutrino oscillation could help us illuminate the very nature of the universe . Since neutrinos have mass , that means they ’re yet another factor that scientists require to take into account when attempt to explain why things look and pretend the manner that they do . But the experimentation has other intention too , like strain to see whether protons , one of the two elementary particle that make up the speck ’s core , decay into other , small subatomic particles . No one ’s ever observed such an effect … but it might happen .
Anyway , if you ’re interested , even Secretary of Energy Rick Perry istweeting about it , so it might as well be deserving tuning in .
Again , thatlive feedbegins at the very nice time of 4:20PM ET .
CERNneutrinosParticle physicsScience
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