![]() They were prototypes to ensure that the production equipment would work and to test two different kinds of detecting technologies. Standing on the platform overlooking ProtoDUNE with CERN physicist Stefania Bordoni, I realized that these enormous cubes were just a fraction of the final DUNE far detector, the larger of the experiment’s two detectors. The data and timing information gathered by these detectors tell researchers where the neutrino came from and about its energy and identity. The electrons drift in the direction of an electrically charged surface containing a particle-detecting element. In liquid argon detectors, some of the neutrinos will interact with the argon nuclei medium, producing particles that in turn knock electrons off of the atoms. In water detectors, neutrinos interact with some of the water molecules, producing particles that in turn generate small flashes of detectable light as they travel faster than the speed light travels through water. ![]() Neutrino-hunting detectors all iterate on a similar concept: Fill the biggest container you can imagine with a detecting medium, like water or liquid argon, and wait for the rare neutrino interactions to happen. Neutrinos pass directly through most matter without so much as a bump, so they’re invisible to most experiments. After my 2017 visit, each empty container would be filled with 800 metric tons of liquid argon. But the ProtoDUNE detectors on the CERN campus in Geneva stood out to me in their starkness they were just a pair of hollow, red steel cubes, each the size of a house, that extended deep into the ground and dwarfed the engineers who stood atop them. Particle physics experiments invariably look like giant, brightly colored masses with pipes and wires coming out in all directions inside of Costco-sized warehouses. ![]() ![]() That was fine, but at the end of the day, our job as scientists is to understand the basic processes of the universe and how it works… It’s not about adding more particles to a long list of particles it’s about, how does the universe really operate in a fundamental way to produce what we see today?” “For a long time, it was about producing new particles, which people won Nobel prizes for. “I think we’re seeing a real change here in what particle physics is about,” Joe Lykken, Fermilab’s deputy director of research, told Gizmodo. A flagship, $2 billion experiment called LBNF/DUNE will lead the search, in pursuit of answers that may take decades or more to find. Unlike the last few decades of successful particle hunts, neutrino physics is a trek into the unknown, one that the United States physics community has chosen to pursue full-on. Today, many physicists think they’ve identified a signpost guiding them toward that question’s answer, thanks to the strange behavior of the universe’s most abundant matter particle, the neutrino, sometimes called a “ghost particle.” The difficult-to-detect neutrino seems to undergo a strange identity-flipping process, and if this reaction occurs differently between neutrinos and antineutrinos, then this process, called neutrino oscillation, could help physicists explain why matter dominates over antimatter.
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