Illuminating the mysteries of matter with DUNE: the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment

Welcome to Physics 28th January 2021

Particle physicists Professor Stefan Söldner-Rembold and Professor Justin Evans are responsible for building key components of the DUNE neutrino experiment. It will answer questions like: why is there more matter than anti-matter and how do star explosions work?

Neutrinos are the fundamental particles of study for DUNE.

What are neutrinos?

Neutrinos are the most abundant matter particle in the Universe and may be linked to phenomena that could explain the structure of the Universe. They are one of the elementary particles that make up our world: in a box of 1 cubic meter, somewhere in the Universe, we have 10 protons and 300 million neutrinos left over from the Big Bang. Neutrinos are everywhere, and yet they are incredibly difficult to catch as:

“[…] they have very nearly no mass, are not charged and rarely interact with other particles. About 100 billion of them travel through our fingertips every second but almost all of them go through the Earth without leaving any trace. Most of these neutrinos originate from nuclear reactions powering the sun. Neutrinos also come from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere, or exploding stars. They were also abundantly produced just after the birth of the universe” – Professor Stefan Söldner-Rembold, for The Conversation

By studying neutrinos, the physicists working on the DUNE experiment hope to gain insights into the origins of the Universe and why it consists predominantly of matter and not antimatter. They can also observe neutrinos from a star explosion (a supernova), the most violent event in the Universe.

The first results from large-scale prototypes of the DUNE detector have been published in the open access article, ‘First results on ProtoDUNE-SP liquid argon time projection chamber performance from a beam test at the CERN Neutrino Platform’

Manchester physicist Professor Stefan Söldner-Rembold, said of these results: “Now we are ready for the construction of the first components for the DUNE detector, which will feature detector modules based on this prototype, but 20 times larger. The detector components will then travel to South Dakota, where they will be installed in giant tanks consisting of 17,000 tons of liquid argon, one mile underground. They will play a key role in unravelling the mystery of neutrinos and their role in the formation of the Universe.”

Article Abstract

The ProtoDUNE-SP detector is a single-phase liquid argon time projection chamber with an active volume of 7.2× 6.1× 7.0 m3. It is installed at the CERN Neutrino Platform in a specially-constructed beam that delivers charged pions, kaons, protons, muons and electrons with momenta in the range 0.3 GeV/c to 7 GeV/c. Beam line instrumentation provides accurate momentum measurements and particle identification. The ProtoDUNE-SP detector is a prototype for the first far detector module of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, and it incorporates full-size components as designed for that module. This paper describes the beam line, the time projection chamber, the photon detectors, the cosmic-ray tagger, the signal processing and particle reconstruction. It presents the first results on ProtoDUNE-SP’s performance, including noise and gain measurements, dE/dx calibration for muons, protons, pions and electrons, drift electron lifetime measurements, and photon detector noise, signal sensitivity and time resolution measurements. The measured values meet or exceed the specifications for the DUNE far detector, in several cases by large margins. ProtoDUNE-SP’s successful operation starting in 2018 and its production of large samples of high-quality data demonstrate the effectiveness of the single-phase far detector design.

antimatterbeamDUNEelementary particlesliquid argonmatterneutrinosnuclear reactionsoriginsparticle physicsstar explosionssupernovauniverse