Fermilab announces end of excavation of the colossal caverns that will take in the DUNE experiment
"Located at 1.6km below the surface, the caverns are at the center of a new research facility that reaches an underground area about the size of eight soccer fields "
Photo credits: © Matthew Kapust
The future home of the gigantic particle detectors for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is now carved. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) has announced that construction workers, who have been working below the surface since 2021, created two colossal caverns for the gigantic particle detector modules of the project. There will be a third cavern, destined to house the utilities for the operation of the detector.
DUNE is a collaboration that includes more than 1 400 scientists and engineers from over 200 institutions in 36 countries and aims to answer questions like “Why is our universe composed of matter?”, “How does an exploding star create a black hole?” and “Are neutrinos connected to dark matter or other undiscovered particles?”.
Photo credits: © Stephen Kenny
LIP became a member of DUNE in May 2018 and has a total of ten members actively working for the project. Ever since the start of our collaboration, we’ve been heavily involved in the design and construction of the calibration systems that will form part of the giant-scale detectors that will be installed in the caverns.