Arts & Sciences Spring 2024

Just as with the search for gravitational waves, work in which Syracuse University astrophysicists played a key role in 2017, A&S researchers are now working to understand the origins of the Universe through the behavior of elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos. At the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), a team of more than 1,400 scientists from over 200 institutions in 36 countries—including faculty and students from the A&S Department of Physics led by professors Mitch Soderberg and Denver Whittington—have been working together over the past decade to explore these particles’ deepest secrets. Understanding how neutrinos — one of the most fundamental, abundant and lightest subatomic particles with mass — interact may be the key to determining why our Universe exists. And now, a major milestone has been reached as excavation workers finished carving out the future home of the four gigantic particle detectors in Lead, South Dakota. Seven-story detectors will be installed a mile below ground and shoot a high-energy beam 800 miles through the Earth. Once online in the coming years, the detectors will record rare neutrino interactions for further analysis. Here’s how it will work: Protons will be sent through a chain of particle accelerators and then into a cylindrical rod of graphite at Fermilab, creating the stream of neutrinos. Those neutrinos will then pass through a detector at Fermilab and continue 800 miles to detectors at the mile-deep Sanford Underground Research Facility, allowing researchers to make definitive determinations of neutrino properties. A&S team members were involved in the development and testing of different detector components as well as prototyping. Syracuse researchers helped develop the massive detectors in South Dakota that will capture the neutrino beam emanating from Illinois. I t takes a really big project to answer questions about some of the Universe’s tiniest particles.

Did you know? Neutrinos rarely interact with anything. They will easily pass straight through the Earth on their high energy “journey” from Illinois to South Dakota.

Read the full story about the science behind DUNE

Go underground with DUNE in this short video.

Spring 2024

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