![]() Once a neutrino is born, it keeps heading in whatever direction it was going, like a kid riding the world’s longest Slip ‘N Slide. Because they are neutral, they can’t be steered by magnetic forces in the same way that charged particles (such as protons) are. They’ll also build the new LBNF beamline itself, using 24 dipole and 17 quadrupole magnets, most of them built by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in India. They’ll construct a new extraction area and beam enclosure, then reinstall the Main Injector magnets with a new Fermilab-built addition: kicker magnets to change the beam’s course. Later, when it’s time for the LBNF beamline construction, the accelerator complex will temporarily power down.Ĭrews will move some of the Main Injector magnets safely out of the way and punch into the accelerator’s enclosure. Site prep work starting at Fermilab in 2019 will move some of the utilities out of the way. “It’s in one of the most congested areas of the Fermilab accelerator complex,” says Elaine McCluskey, the LBNF project manager at Fermilab. That’s no easy feat, considering all the utilities, other beamlines, and Main Injector magnets around. Engineers will need to build and connect a new beamline. The first step is to siphon off particles from the Main Injector-otherwise, the circular accelerator will act more like a merry-go-round. A long baseline means that LBNF will send its neutrinos a long distance-1300 kilometers, from Fermilab to Sanford Lab-and the neutrino facility means … let’s make some neutrinos. So how do researchers plan to turn Fermilab’s first megawatt beam of protons into the trillions of high-energy neutrinos they need for DUNE every second? This calls for some extra infrastructure: The Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, or LBNF. The twist? Fermilab’s particle accelerators propel protons-useful particles, but not the ones that neutrino scientists want to study. Particles then enter the Booster Ring for another… well, boost, and finally head to the Main Injector, Fermilab’s most powerful accelerator. This is the first accelerator project in the United States with major international contributions, and it will propel particles to 84% of the speed of light as they travel about the length of two football fields. Work has started for an upgrade to the complex that will include a new linear accelerator at the start of the journey: PIP-II. That’s where Fermilab’s particle accelerator complex comes in.įermilab sends particles through a series of accelerators, each adding a burst of speed and energy. ![]() But if you want to make trillions of high-energy neutrinos every second and send them to a particle detector deep underground, you’d be hard-pressed to do it by throwing fruit toward South Dakota. You’ll find them coming in droves from stars like our sun, inside Earth, even the potassium in bananas. Neutrinos (and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos) are born as other particles decay, carrying away small amounts of energy to balance the cosmic ledger. The detectors can pick up neutrinos from exploding stars that might evolve into black holes and capture interactions from a deliberately aimed beam of neutrinos. At their home 1.5 kilometers below the rock in the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, they’ll be shielded from interfering cosmic rays-though neutrinos will have no trouble passing through that buffer and hitting their mark. More matter inside the DUNE detectors means more things for neutrinos to interact with, and these behemoth neutrino traps will contain a total of 70,000 tons of liquid argon. Because neutrinos are so antisocial, scientists will build enormous particle detectors to catch and study them. To tackle the biggest questions, DUNE will look at mysterious subatomic particles called neutrinos: neutral, wispy wraiths that rarely interact with matter. The experiment brings together more than 1000 people from 30-plus countries to tackle questions that have kept many a person awake at night: Why is the universe full of matter and not antimatter, or no matter at all? Do protons, one of the building blocks of atoms (and of us), ever decay? How do black holes form? And did I leave the stove on? ![]() All three are true for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by the Department of Energy’s Fermilab. Physics experiments that push the extent of human knowledge tend to work at the extremes: the biggest and smallest scales, the highest intensities. After all, this is the world’s most intense high-energy neutrino beam, so we’re talking about jumbo-sized parts: magnets the size of park benches and ultrapure rods of graphite as tall as Danny DeVito. ![]() What do you need to make the most intense beam of neutrinos in the world? Just a few magnets and some pencil lead. ![]()
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