UK invests £65M in Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment in US

There were a lot of happy neutrino physicists around the UK and the US on Wednesday, as the long-standing partnership between the two countries in particle physics was bolstered by a new agreementDUNE is one of the betterparticle physics acronyms. The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment involves a large, sensitive detector which will indeed be deep underground - in the Sanford Lab at the Homestake goldmine in South Dakota – and will study neutrinos produced from a high-intensity beam of protons at Fermilab in Illinois. UK scientists from several universities are already deeply involved in the experiment, and Cambridge’s Prof. Mark Thomson is one of the two spokespeople who lead the experiment internationally.The science of neutrinos is fascinating, with wide implications for our understanding of the universe and how it operates. Neutrinos are produced copiously in the Sun, and are the second most abundant particle in the universe. In the original conception of the “Standard Model” of particle physics, they were taken to be massless. Thediscovery that they actually have a - very tiny but non-zero - mass remains the only major modification forced upon the Standard Model since it was established. Fittingly, the first measurement leading to that discoverytook place in the Homestake mine, which will now be reoccupied by one of the DUNE detectors. A goldmine in more than one sense.Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Science Physics Particle physics Research funding Source Type: news