From MIT Caltech Advanced aLIGO : “LIGO Ready to Explore Secrets of the Universe”
From MIT Caltech Advanced aLIGO
5.24.23
Whitney Clavin
(626) 395‑1944
wclavin@caltech.edu
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LIGO-VIRGO-KAGRA-GEO 600-LIGO-India-ESA/NASA LISA
Caltech/MIT Advanced aLigo detector installation Livingston, LA. installation. Credit: Caltech.
Caltech/MIT Advanced aLigo Hanford, WA. installation. Credit: Caltech.
VIRGO Gravitational Wave interferometer installation, near Pisa (IT).
KAGRA Large-scale Cryogenic Gravitational Wave Telescope Project installation (JP).
The European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU)National Aeronautics and Space Administration eLISA space based, the future of gravitational wave research, due to launch in 2037.
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Today, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration begins a new observing run with upgraded instruments and other improvements to boost the search for gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time, generated by colliding black holes and other extreme cosmic events. The LVK collaboration consists of scientists across the globe who use a network of gravitational-wave observatories—LIGO in the United States, Virgo in Europe, and KAGRA in Japan.
This observing run, the fourth since the National Science Foundation-funded LIGO made history in 2015 by making the first direct detection of gravitational waves, will be the most sensitive yet. Called 04, the run begins on May 24, 2023, and will last 20 months, including up to two months of commissioning breaks, during which work can be undertaken to further improve instrument performance. The twin LIGO observatories will resume operations May 24, and Virgo will join later in the year. KAGRA will join for one month beginning May 24, then rejoin later in the run after some upgrades.
“Our LIGO teams have worked through hardship during the past two-plus years to be ready for this moment, and we are indeed ready: our engineering run leading up to tomorrow’s official start of 04 has already revealed a number of candidate events, which we have shared with the astronomical community,” says Caltech’s Albert Lazzarini, the deputy director of the LIGO Laboratory. “Most of these involve black hole binary systems, although one may include a neutron star. The rates appear to be consistent with expectations.”
The LIGO detectors will begin the run with an increase in sensitivity of approximately 30 percent. This increased sensitivity means that the detectors will observe a larger fraction of the universe than before and will pick up gravitational-wave signals at a higher rate, detecting a merger every two or three days.
Additionally, the increased sensitivity will allow scientists to extract more physical information from the data, which will allow them to better test Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and infer the true population of dead stars in the local universe.
“Thanks to the work of more than a thousand people around the world over the last few years, we’ll get our deepest glimpse of the gravitational-wave universe yet,” said Jess McIver, the deputy spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC). “A greater reach means we will learn more about black holes and neutron stars, and increases the chances we will find something new. We’re very excited to see what’s out there.”
The first gravitational-wave signals were detected in 2015. Two years later, LIGO and Virgo detected a merger of two neutron stars, which caused an explosion called a kilonova, subsequently observed by dozens of telescopes around the world. So far, the global network has detected more than 80 black hole mergers, two probable neutron star mergers, and a few events that were most likely black holes merging with neutron stars.
As in previous observing runs, alerts about gravitational-wave detection candidates will be distributed publicly. Information about how to receive and interpret public alerts is available at wiki.gw-astronomy.org/OpenLVEM.
The Virgo detector will continue commissioning activities to increase its sensitivity before joining the run later this year. “Over the past few months, we have identified various noise sources and have made good progress in sensitivity, but it is not yet at its design goal,” declared recently elected Virgo spokesperson Gianluca Gemme. “We are convinced that achieving the best detector sensitivity is the best way to maximize its discovery potential.”
KAGRA is now running with the sensitivity that was planned for the beginning of the run. Jun’ichi Yokoyama, the chair of KAGRA Scientific Congress, says, “We will join O4 for one month and resume commissioning to further improve the sensitivity toward our first detection.”
More information about the observatories
LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived and built the project. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was led by NSF with Germany (MPG Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council), and Australia (Australian Research Council) making significant commitments and contributions to the project. More than 1,500 scientists from around the world participate in the effort through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration. Additional partners are listed at ligo.org/partners.php.
The Virgo Collaboration is currently composed of approximately 850 members from 143 institutions in 15 different (mainly European) countries. The European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) hosts the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy and is funded by Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in France, the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy, and the National Institute for Subatomic Physics (Nikhef) in the Netherlands. A list of the Virgo Collaboration groups can be found at public.virgo-gw.eu/the-virgo-collaboration/.
KAGRA is a laser interferometer in Kamioka, Gifu, Japan. The host institute is the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR) at the University of Tokyo, and the project is co-hosted by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK). The KAGRA collaboration is composed of more than 480 members from 115 institutes in 17 countries/regions.
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The Collaborations
LIGO is funded by NSF and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived of LIGO and led the Initial and Advanced LIGO projects. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was led by the NSF with Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council) and Australia (Australian Research Council-OzGrav) making significant commitments and contributions to the project. More than 1,200 scientists from around the world participate in the effort through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration. A list of additional partners is available at https://my.ligo.org/census.php.
The Virgo collaboration consists of more than 300 physicists and engineers belonging to 28 different European research groups: six from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France; 11 from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy; two in the Netherlands with Nikhef; the MTA Wigner RCP in Hungary; the POLGRAW group in Poland; Spain with IFAE and the Universities of Valencia and Barcelona; two in Belgium with the Universities of Liege and Louvain; Jena University in Germany; and the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), the laboratory hosting the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy, funded by CNRS, INFN, and Nikhef. A list of the Virgo Collaboration can be found at http://public.virgo-gw.eu/the-virgo-collaboration/. More information is available on the Virgo website at http://www.virgo-gw.eu.
Skymap showing how adding Virgo to LIGO helps in reducing the size of the source-likely region in the sky. (Credit: Giuseppe Greco (Virgo Urbino group)
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From SURF-The Sanford Underground Research Facility And The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory : “Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment From Fermilab”
From SURF-The Sanford Underground Research Facility
And
FNAL Art Image by Angela Gonzales
The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to High Energy Physics [HEP] scientific research worldwide.
5.16.23
The Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility will host the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment-the world’s flagship neutrino experiment.
Scientists with the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) hope to revolutionize our understanding of the role neutrinos play in the creation of the universe.
Using the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF), they’ll shoot a beam of neutrinos from Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, 800 miles through the earth to detectors deep underground at SURF in Lead, South Dakota. LBNF will provide the infrastructure at Fermilab and SURF to support the DUNE detectors.
This ambitious experiment will tackle some of the largest mysteries in the field of particle physics, including the search for the origin of matter and the unification of forces. And if a core-collapse supernova occurs in the Milky Way, we just might be able to see inside a newly formed neutron star and, potentially, witness the birth of a black hole.
A mile underground: the large caverns and detectors of DUNE.
Excavating for big science
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Fermilab LBNF/DUNE Neutrino Experiment
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE LBNF from FNAL to Sanford Underground Research Facility, Lead, South Dakota.
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE/ LBNF Caverns at Sanford Underground Research Facility.
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On the 4850 Level of SURF, construction crews have been working tirelessly to carve out a network of caverns and tunnels that one day will house a huge neutrino experiment. Once finished, LBNF will be the site of the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.
The new underground area at SURF will consist of three large caverns. Two will measure around 500 feet long, 65 feet wide and 90 feet high. These will provide space to house four detector modules — each filled with 17,000 tons of ultrapure liquid argon. The third will be around 625 feet long, 65 feet wide and 36 feet tall and contain cryogenic support systems, detector electronics and data acquisition equipment.
To create these caverns, a total of approximately 800,000 tons of rock will be excavated and moved to the surface. Once complete, the footprint of the underground area with the three caverns will cover about the size of eight soccer fields.
Building a ship in a bottle.
Due to their size, many of DUNE’s science components will not fit on the elevator-like conveyance used to transport people and materials through the shaft. Instead, science components will be suspended beneath the cage and lowered underground.
In December 2022, the first DUNE science components arrived at SURF for a test lift in the shaft. Standing a staggering 19.7 feet tall and 7.5 feet wide (6.0 meters tall; 2.3 meters wide), the anode plane arrays are the largest and one of the most fragile components of DUNE.
International collaboration
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab is the host laboratory for DUNE, in partnership with funding agencies and more than 1,000 scientists from all over the globe. They contribute expertise and components, which provide economic benefits to each of the partner institutions and countries. DUNE consists of massive neutrino detectors, at Fermilab in Illinois and Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. LBNF produces the world’s most intense neutrino beam and provides the infrastructure. The PIP-II particle accelerator at Fermilab powers the neutrino beam.
See the full article here .
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The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been operated by the Fermi Research Alliance, a joint venture of the University of Chicago, and the Universities Research Association (URA). Fermilab is a part of the Illinois Technology and Research Corridor.
Fermilab’s Tevatron was a landmark particle accelerator; until the startup in 2008 of the Large Hadron Collider(CH) near Geneva, Switzerland, it was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, accelerating antiprotons to energies of 500 GeV, and producing proton-proton collisions with energies of up to 1.6 TeV, the first accelerator to reach one “tera-electron-volt” energy. At 3.9 miles (6.3 km), it was the world’s fourth-largest particle accelerator in circumference. One of its most important achievements was the 1995 discovery of the top quark, announced by research teams using the Tevatron’s CDF and DØ detectors. It was shut down in 2011.
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[Earlier than the LHC at CERN, The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory had sought the Higgs with the Tevatron Accelerator.
But the Tevatron could barely muster 2 TeV [Terraelectron volts], not enough energy to find the Higgs. CERN’s LHC is capable of 13 TeV.
Another possible attempt in the U.S. would have been the Super Conducting Supercollider.
Fermilab has gone on to become a world powerhouse in neutrino research with the LBNF/DUNE project which will send neutrinos 800 miles to SURF-The Sanford Underground Research Facility in in Lead, South Dakota.
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About us: SURF-The Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota, advances our understanding of the universe by providing laboratory space deep underground, where sensitive physics experiments can be shielded from cosmic radiation. Researchers at the Sanford Lab explore some of the most challenging questions facing 21st century physics, such as the origin of matter, the nature of dark matter and the properties of neutrinos. The facility also hosts experiments in other disciplines—including geology, biology and engineering.
The Sanford Lab is located at the former Homestake gold mine, which was a physics landmark long before being converted into a dedicated science facility. Nuclear chemist Ray Davis earned a share of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2002 for a solar neutrino experiment he installed 4,850 feet underground in the mine.
Homestake closed in 2003, but the company donated the property to South Dakota in 2006 for use as an underground laboratory. That same year, philanthropist T. Denny Sanford donated $70 million to the project. The South Dakota Legislature also created the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority to operate the lab. The state Legislature has committed more than $40 million in state funds to the project, and South Dakota also obtained a $10 million Community Development Block Grant to help rehabilitate the facility.
In 2007, after the National Science Foundation named Homestake as the preferred site for a proposed national Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL), the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority (SDSTA) began reopening the former gold mine.
In December 2010, the National Science Board decided not to fund further design of DUSEL. However, in 2011 the Department of Energy, through the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, agreed to support ongoing science operations at Sanford Lab, while investigating how to use the underground research facility for other longer-term experiments. The SDSTA, which owns Sanford Lab, continues to operate the facility under that agreement with Berkeley Lab.
The first two major physics experiments at the Sanford Lab are 4,850 feet underground in an area called the Davis Campus, named for the late Ray Davis. The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment is housed in the same cavern excavated for Ray Davis’s experiment in the 1960s.
In October 2013, after an initial run of 80 days, LUX was determined to be the most sensitive detector yet to search for dark matter—a mysterious, yet-to-be-detected substance thought to be the most prevalent matter in the universe. The University of Washington MAJORANA Neutrinoless Double-beta Decay Experiment Demonstrator experiment, also on the 4850 Level, is searching for a rare phenomenon called “neutrinoless double-beta decay” that could reveal whether subatomic particles called neutrinos can be their own antiparticle. Detection of neutrinoless double-beta decay could help determine why matter prevailed over antimatter. The Majorana Demonstrator experiment is adjacent to the original Davis cavern.
The LUX Xenon dark matter detector | Sanford Underground Research Facility mission was to scour the universe for WIMPs, vetoing all other signatures. It would continue to do just that for another three years before it was decommissioned in 2016.
In the midst of the excitement over first results, the LUX collaboration was already casting its gaze forward. Planning for a next-generation dark matter experiment at Sanford Lab was already under way. Named LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), the next-generation experiment would increase the sensitivity of LUX 100 times.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory physicist Tom Shutt, a previous co-spokesperson for LUX, said one goal of the experiment was to figure out how to build an even larger detector.
“LZ will be a thousand times more sensitive than the LUX detector,” Shutt said. “It will just begin to see an irreducible background of neutrinos that may ultimately set the limit to our ability to measure dark matter.”
We celebrate five years of LUX, and look into the steps being taken toward the much larger and far more sensitive experiment.
Another major experiment, the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE)—a collaboration with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and Sanford Lab, is in the preliminary design stages. The project got a major boost last year when Congress approved and the president signed an Omnibus Appropriations bill that will fund LBNE operations through FY 2014. Called the “next frontier of particle physics,” LBNE will follow neutrinos as they travel 800 miles through the earth, from FermiLab in Batavia, Ill., to Sanford Lab.
The MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR will contain 40 kg of germanium; up to 30 kg will be enriched to 86% in 76Ge. The DEMONSTRATOR will be deployed deep underground in an ultra-low-background shielded environment in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, SD. The goal of the DEMONSTRATOR is to determine whether a future 1-tonne experiment can achieve a background goal of one count per tonne-year in a 4-keV region of interest around the 76Ge 0νββ Q-value at 2039 keV. MAJORANA plans to collaborate with Germanium Detector Array (or GERDA) experiment is searching for neutrinoless double beta decay (0νββ) in Ge-76 at the underground Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) for a future tonne-scale 76Ge 0νββ search.
Compact Accelerator System for Performing Astrophysical Research (CASPAR). Credit: Nick Hubbard.
Compact Accelerator System for Performing Astrophysical Research (CASPAR). Credit: Nick Hubbard.
CASPAR is a low-energy particle accelerator that allows researchers to study processes that take place inside collapsing stars.
The scientists are using space in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, South Dakota, to work on a project called the Compact Accelerator System for Performing Astrophysical Research (CASPAR). CASPAR uses a low-energy particle accelerator that will allow researchers to mimic nuclear fusion reactions in stars. If successful, their findings could help complete our picture of how the elements in our universe are built. “Nuclear astrophysics is about what goes on inside the star, not outside of it,” said Dan Robertson, a Notre Dame assistant research professor of astrophysics working on CASPAR. “It is not observational, but experimental. The idea is to reproduce the stellar environment, to reproduce the reactions within a star.”
SURF- the 3D DAS experiment is studying digital acoustic sensing techniques with a novel, three-dimensional seismic array. The University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Air Force Research Laboratory. Photo by Adam Gomez. The 3D DAS is led by Stanford University and includes industry partners and seven universities.
richardmitnick
From “Symmetry”: “Practice makes perfect (particle detectors)”
4.18.23
Madeleine O’Keefe
Prototyping is an indispensable step in the development of particle physics experiments like DUNE and projects like PIP-II.
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE LBNF from FNAL to Sanford Underground Research Facility, Lead, South Dakota in development.
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE/ LBNF Caverns at Sanford Underground Research Facility.
When complete, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, will be the world’s most comprehensive neutrino experiment—and installing the giant far detector for DUNE in a cavern a mile underground will be like the world’s largest game of Operation.
DUNE will consist of two detectors: a smaller near detector, to be located at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois; and a larger far detector, to be located at Sanford Underground Research Facility, or SURF, in South Dakota.
The far detector is designed to be made up of four modules—two of which are under construction, and two of which are still being planned—each the dimensions of an almost-six-story building and as long as a football field. One module will be made up of 25 rows of smaller neutrino detectors called anode plane assemblies—APAs—some of the experiment’s most fragile components.
With the DUNE far detector at SURF being assembled in an underground cavern, there is not much wiggle room to work. The technicians installing the final row of APAs will be up against a wall and will have just a couple of meters to safely operate in; once they bring in the scissor lift, there will be just enough room for a human to walk between it and the APAs. After they’re done, they will have to squeeze back through, bringing with them all the tools and instruments they brought in.
To finish the detector, “we are working with inches to spare,” says Tom Wieber, manager at another underground laboratory, NOvA Far Detector Facility in Ash River, Minnesota.
Wieber knows the constraints well, as he is playing an essential role in preparation for the final installation.
NOvA is also a long-distance neutrino experiment. It consists of a far detector in Ash River and a near detector at Fermilab. A beam of neutrinos originating at Fermilab is sent through both detectors.
Once NOvA was assembled, the Ash River facility had sufficient high-bay space to create a trial assembly area for DUNE; it is the only place with two prototype APAs that technicians can practice working with.
Prototyping is an indispensable step in the development of large particle physics experiments. From testing the components to confirm they will work in experimental conditions to rehearsing the transportation and assembly of pieces, particle physics collaborations go to great lengths to ensure that the experiment will perform as expected.
Many components of DUNE use specially developed tools that Wieber and his team fabricate in-house, based on design drawings and lists of materials. They then test the tools on their DUNE prototype.
“We have great engineers behind us who design the tools and fixtures in such a way that we just have to find out how to use them safely,” says Wieber. “Like, are they too heavy? Do we need another helper tool to make installation or removal easier? What sort of things need to be put on lanyards so that they don’t fall? At any point when you’re using this, is it impossible to use without three hands?”
When they run into a problem, Wieber’s team informs the engineers of the issue and proposes potential fixes. Then the design is revised, and the process starts again.
“I can probably count on one hand how many version-one widgets, tools, fixtures have not had some sort of modification after being tested—some of them simple, some of them totally reworked,” says Wieber.
“All of the lessons learned are valuable,” he says. “Anything that was difficult, time-consuming, whatever—it needs to be recorded. Because we’re building a prototype, and if there’s a problem…it needs to be documented so that when we go to scale this thing to kilotons, [the problem is] not compounded.”
Ash River’s setup is versatile enough that Wieber and his team can test many things at once. For example, they are installing their two APAs at different orientations to test cable length. Simultaneously, they are testing the “bendiness” of a cathode plane—to see whether it will straighten out after being held in a crescent-moon shape.
“The [cathode plane assemblies] at CERN are not hanging straight, so [the high-voltage consortium] asked us to perform this test because we have the only other hanging CPAs in existence,” Wieber says. “So, we said, yeah, we can.
Testing a new cryomodule
The detectors are not the only parts of DUNE that can benefit from a test run.
Tests of the DUNE detector components began in 2017 at CERN with a pair of one-twentieth-scale prototypes aptly called ProtoDUNE.
Each ProtoDUNE detector used different liquid argon time-projection chamber designs, and both were instrumented with a small number of full-scale detector components.
And there’s the particle accelerator that will produce the beam of neutrinos the detectors will study. DUNE will be powered by a new superconducting linear accelerator at Fermilab, which is being built through the Proton Improvement Plan II, or PIP-II, project [above]. The accelerator will comprise five different types of cryomodules that house and cool the superconducting cavities that will accelerate the particles to over 80% the speed of light.
The PIP-II team at Fermilab recently completed assembling a prototype of one of the cryomodules. Called the high-beta 650-MegaHertz, or HB650, cryomodule, it is the largest cryomodule in the accelerator; four HB650 cryomodules will make up the final stage of acceleration.
The team installed the prototype in a cryomodule test stand at Fermilab in January and February of 2023. The installation process required technicians to connect the prototype to its radio-frequency power source, instrumentation readouts and the cryogenic distribution system that will cool it to superconducting temperatures.
“This one being a prototype cryomodule, it is instrumented extensively with sensors—much more than what we would do in a typical production-phase cryomodule—so that we can observe, monitor and then use that information to validate our designs,” says Saravan Chandrasekaran, former PIP-II manager for the HB650 cryomodule at Fermilab, who led the assembly.
Even the cryomodule’s installation on its stand resulted in feedback on the cryomodule design. Chandrasekaran says both the stand and the cryomodule will likely change designs slightly to accommodate each other better.
“We work as one team,” he says. “We are all working toward getting an accelerator for our lab.”
In late February, the team received clearance to operate the prototype. And in early March, they began the “cooldown” process to test the cryomodule’s ability to reach the 2 Kelvin, or minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit, required for superconductivity.
“The prototype essentially serves as the best vehicle for us to test out all of the designs [and] confirm all of the interfaces to highlight any issues that might be inherently present and provide us an opportunity to address them prior to moving into the production phase,” says Chandrasekaran.
In mid-March, the PIP-II team reported that they successfully completed the prototype’s cooldown on the first try. The cryomodule had reached 2 K in less than six days with no technical issues. In April, the team put radiofrequency power into the first of six cavities. While there’s still lots of testing to be done, once the data comes in and is analyzed—and demonstrates the required performance—the team will feel more confident about this cryomodule design.
“They say the proof of the pudding is in the tasting,” says Joe Ozelis, who now manages the PIP-II HB650 cryomodule program. “Well, for us, the proof of the design is in the testing.”
See the full article here .
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Symmetry is a joint Fermilab/SLAC publication.
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From The DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory And The Trinity College of Arts & Sciences At Duke University: “Catching Dark Matter in a Basement”
From The DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory
And
The Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
At
4.12.23
Marie Claire Chelini | Trinity Communications – Duke University
Dawn M Levy
levyd@ornl.gov
865.576.6448
Few things carry the same aura of mystery as dark matter. The name itself radiates secrecy, suggesting something hidden in the shadows of the Universe.
Dark matter, the invisible stuff that makes up 85% of the Universe’s matter, isn’t just hidden away between galaxies. A team of scientists is trying to bring it out of the shadows. (X-ray: NASA/CXO/Fabian et al.; Radio: Gendron-Marsolais et al.; NRAO/AUI/NSF Optical: NASA, SDSS)
A collaborative team of scientists called COHERENT, including Kate Scholberg, Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of Physics, Phillip Barbeau, associate professor of Physics, and postdoctoral scholar Daniel Pershey, attempted to bring dark matter out of the shadows of the Universe [Physical Review Letters (below)] and into a slightly less glamorous destination: a brightly lit, narrow hallway in a basement.
Not an ordinary basement, though. Working in an area of Oak Ridge National Laboratory nicknamed “Neutrino Alley”, the team typically focuses on subatomic particles called neutrinos. They are produced when stars die and become supernovas, or, on a more down-to-Earth level, as a by-product of proton collisions in particle accelerators.
Not coincidentally, Neutrino Alley is located directly underneath one of the most powerful particle accelerators in the world, Oak Ridge’s Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) [below]. Neutrino Alley houses a collection of detectors specifically designed to observe neutrinos as they pass through and collide with them.
Kate Scholberg, co-author Grayson Rich and Philip Barbeau. (Long Li /Duke University)
Neutrinos aren’t the only by-product of SNS’s operations, though. Dark matter (not to be confused with the movie villain favorite anti-matter) is also produced when particle accelerators crash protons together. Following up on years of theoretical calculation, the COHERENT team set out to capitalize both on SNS’s power and on the sensitivity of their neutrino detectors to observe dark matter in Neutrino Alley.
“And we didn’t see it,” says Scholberg. “Of course, if we had seen it, it would have been more exciting, but not seeing it is actually a big deal.”
She explains that the fact that dark matter wasn’t observed by their neutrino detectors allows them to greatly refine the theoretical models of what dark matter looks like.
“We know exactly how the detector would respond to dark matter if dark matter had certain characteristics, so we were looking for that specific fingerprint.”
The fingerprint in question is the way in which the nuclei of the atoms in the neutrino detector recoil when hit by a neutrino, or in this case, by a dark matter particle.
Jason Newby and co-author Yuri Efremenko hold a photosensor used for particle detection in Neutrino Alley. (Genevieve Martin/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy)
“It’s like throwing projectiles at a bowling ball on a sheet of ice,” said Pershey. The bowling balls, in his analogy, are the atoms contained in the neutrino detector — which in this experiment was a 14.6 kg cesium iodide crystal. “You can tell a lot about the projectile and the force with which it was thrown by how much the bowling ball recoils upon contact.”
When it comes to dark matter, any information is good information. No one really knows what it is. Almost 100 years ago, physicists realized that the Universe couldn’t behave the way it did if all it contained was the stuff we can see.
“We’re floating in a sea of dark matter,” said Jason Newby, group leader for neutrino research at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a co-author of the study. The consensus among physicists is that dark matter makes up to 85% of the mass of the Universe. It must be subject to gravity to explain the Universe’s behavior, but it doesn’t interact with any sort of light or electromagnetic wave, appearing dark.
“We learned about it by looking at big galaxies rotating around each other, seeing that they rotate way faster than they ought to [Coma cluster above], implying that they have more mass than they appear to have,” said Pershey. “So we know that there’s extra stuff out there, we just need to learn where to look for it.”
“Even though we’re in the realm of mostly no results,” said Newby, “it’s really important that everywhere you can look, you look, and then you can rule out a whole number of possibilities and focus on a new area with strategy rather than just using a ‘spaghetti on the wall’ approach.”
“We’re extending our reach for what models for dark matter can exist, and that’s very powerful,” said Scholberg.
She points out that the achievement doesn’t stop there: the experiment also allowed the team to extend the worldwide search for dark matter in a new way.
“The typical detection technology is to go underground, build a very sensitive detector, and wait for these dark matter particles to just pass through,” said Pershey.
The problem? Dark matter particles may be travelling quite leisurely through the air. If they also happen to be very light, they may not reach the detector with enough energy to create a detectable fingerprint.
The COHERENT team experimental setup addresses this issue.
“When you go to an accelerator, you produce those particles at significantly higher energies,” said Pershey. “And that gives them a lot more oomph to knock into nuclei and make the dark matter signal appear.”
So, what now? It’s not quite back to the drawing board. Neutrino Alley is currently preparing to receive a much larger and more sensitive detector, which, combined with COHERENT’s refined search parameters, will greatly improve the chances of catching one of these devilish particles.
“We’re at the doorstep of where the dark matter should be,” said Pershey.
See the full Oak Ridge article here .
See the full Duke University article here.
Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.
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Trinity College of Arts and Sciences is the undergraduate liberal arts college of Duke University. Founded in 1838, it is the original school of the university. Currently, Trinity is one of two undergraduate colleges at Duke, the other being the Edmund T. Pratt School of Engineering.
At Duke, Arts & Sciences is the collective name of all educational programs, research programs, and faculty in the humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences at Duke, inclusive of undergraduate programs and many degree programs in Duke’s Graduate School.
The division’s unusual dual name may reflect the fact that it is responsible for undergraduate education (through Trinity College) and graduate education and research (Arts and Sciences).
Younger than most other prestigious U.S. research universities, Duke University consistently ranks among the very best. Duke’s graduate and professional schools — in business, divinity, engineering, the environment, law, medicine, nursing and public policy — are among the leaders in their fields. Duke’s home campus is situated on nearly 9,000 acres in Durham, N.C, a city of more than 200,000 people. Duke also is active internationally through the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore, Duke Kunshan University in China and numerous research and education programs across the globe. More than 75 percent of Duke students pursue service-learning opportunities in Durham and around the world through DukeEngage and other programs that advance the university’s mission of “knowledge in service to society.”
Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James Buchanan Duke established The Duke Endowment and the institution changed its name to honor his deceased father, Washington Duke.
The campus spans over 8,600 acres (3,500 hectares) on three contiguous sub-campuses in Durham, and a marine lab in Beaufort. The West Campus—designed largely by architect Julian Abele, an African American architect who graduated first in his class at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design—incorporates Gothic architecture with the 210-foot (64-meter) Duke Chapel at the campus’ center and highest point of elevation, is adjacent to the Medical Center. East Campus, 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) away, home to all first-years, contains Georgian-style architecture. The university administers two concurrent schools in Asia, Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore (established in 2005) and Duke Kunshan University in Kunshan, China (established in 2013).
Duke is ranked among the top universities in the United States. The undergraduate admissions are among the most selective in the country, with an overall acceptance rate of 5.7% for the class of 2025. Duke spends more than $1 billion per year on research, making it one of the ten largest research universities in the United States. More than a dozen faculty regularly appear on annual lists of the world’s most-cited researchers. As of 2019, 15 Nobel laureates and 3 Turing Award winners have been affiliated with the university. Duke alumni also include 50 Rhodes Scholars, 25 Churchill Scholars, 13 Schwarzman Scholars, and 8 Mitchell Scholars. The university has produced the third highest number of Churchill Scholars of any university (behind Princeton University and Harvard University) and the fifth-highest number of Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, Goldwater, and Udall Scholars of any American university between 1986 and 2015. Duke is the alma mater of one president of the United States (Richard Nixon) and 14 living billionaires.
Duke is the second-largest private employer in North Carolina, with more than 39,000 employees. The university has been ranked as an excellent employer by several publications.
Research
Duke’s research expenditures in the 2018 fiscal year were $1.168 billion, the tenth largest in the U.S. In fiscal year 2019 Duke received $571 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health. Duke is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.
Throughout the school’s history, Duke researchers have made breakthroughs, including the biomedical engineering department’s development of the world’s first real-time, three-dimensional ultrasound diagnostic system and the first engineered blood vessels and stents. In 2015, Paul Modrich shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2012, Robert Lefkowitz along with Brian Kobilka, who is also a former affiliate, shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on cell surface receptors. Duke has pioneered studies involving nonlinear dynamics, chaos, and complex systems in physics.
In May 2006 Duke researchers mapped the final human chromosome, which made world news as it marked the completion of the Human Genome Project. Reports of Duke researchers’ involvement in new AIDS vaccine research surfaced in June 2006. The biology department combines two historically strong programs in botany and zoology, while one of the divinity school’s leading theologians is Stanley Hauerwas, whom Time named “America’s Best Theologian” in 2001. The graduate program in literature boasts several internationally renowned figures, including Fredric Jameson, Michael Hardt, and Rey Chow, while philosophers Robert Brandon and Lakatos Award-winner Alexander Rosenberg contribute to Duke’s ranking as the nation’s best program in philosophy of biology, according to the Philosophical Gourmet Report.
Established in 1942, The DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the largest science and energy national laboratory in the Department of Energy system (by size) and third largest by annual budget. It is located in the Roane County section of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Its scientific programs focus on materials, neutron science, energy, high-performance computing, systems biology and national security, sometimes in partnership with the state of Tennessee, universities and other industries.
ORNL has several of the world’s top supercomputers, including Summit, ranked by the TOP500 as Earth’s second-most powerful.
ORNL OLCF IBM Q AC922 SUMMIT supercomputer, No. 5 on the TOP500. .
The lab is a leading neutron and nuclear power research facility that includes the Spallation Neutron Source and High Flux Isotope Reactor.
ORNL Spallation Neutron Source annotated.
It hosts the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, the BioEnergy Science Center, and the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Nuclear Reactors.
ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
Areas of research
ORNL conducts research and development activities that span a wide range of scientific disciplines. Many research areas have a significant overlap with each other; researchers often work in two or more of the fields listed here. The laboratory’s major research areas are described briefly below.
Chemical sciences – ORNL conducts both fundamental and applied research in a number of areas, including catalysis, surface science and interfacial chemistry; molecular transformations and fuel chemistry; heavy element chemistry and radioactive materials characterization; aqueous solution chemistry and geochemistry; mass spectrometry and laser spectroscopy; separations chemistry; materials chemistry including synthesis and characterization of polymers and other soft materials; chemical biosciences; and neutron science.
Electron microscopy – ORNL’s electron microscopy program investigates key issues in condensed matter, materials, chemical and nanosciences.
Nuclear medicine – The laboratory’s nuclear medicine research is focused on the development of improved reactor production and processing methods to provide medical radioisotopes, the development of new radionuclide generator systems, the design and evaluation of new radiopharmaceuticals for applications in nuclear medicine and oncology.
Physics – Physics research at ORNL is focused primarily on studies of the fundamental properties of matter at the atomic, nuclear, and subnuclear levels and the development of experimental devices in support of these studies.
Population – ORNL provides federal, state and international organizations with a gridded population database, called Landscan, for estimating ambient population. LandScan is a raster image, or grid, of population counts, which provides human population estimates every 30 x 30 arc seconds, which translates roughly to population estimates for 1 kilometer square windows or grid cells at the equator, with cell width decreasing at higher latitudes. Though many population datasets exist, LandScan is the best spatial population dataset, which also covers the globe. Updated annually (although data releases are generally one year behind the current year) offers continuous, updated values of population, based on the most recent information. Landscan data are accessible through GIS applications and a USAID public domain application called Population Explorer.
richardmitnick
From The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory : “DUNE Resources Review Board to meet in South Dakota for the first time”
FNAL Art Image by Angela Gonzales
From The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to High Energy Physics [HEP] scientific research worldwide.
3.29.23
Diana Kwon
On March 30 and 31, representatives from science funding agencies around the world were to meet in Lead, South Dakota, to view the progress on the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment [below], an international experiment hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
The funding agency representatives are members of the DUNE Resources Review Board, a group of about 40 people who provide oversight of DUNE and coordination among funding agencies. They meet three times a year. This is their first meeting in Lead, South Dakota.
More than 1,400 scientists and engineers across 200 institutions in over 35 countries collaborate on DUNE to decipher the secrets of the neutrino.
“The RRB helps facilitate a strong partnership between the member countries of DUNE,” said Fermilab Deputy Director for Science and Technology Bonnie Fleming, chair of the RRB.
Fermilab Deputy Director for Science and Technology Bonnie Fleming, chair of the DUNE Resources Review Board. Credit: Fermilab.
“DUNE is bringing together many different countries to construct a very large and complicated experiment. This requires close coordination between all these partners.”
The DUNE collaboration focuses on studying subatomic particles known as neutrinos.
They may hold the answers to some of the biggest open questions in physics, such as why our universe is made of matter and how neutron stars and black holes are formed.
Construction has begun on DUNE particle detector components as well as the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, which will provide the space, infrastructure, and neutrino beam for the experiment. Fermilab, located in Illinois, will house the DUNE near detector and provide the particle beam.
The neutrinos will travel 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) straight through Earth to the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. There the DUNE far detector —located 1.5 kilometers (about a mile) below the surface — will catch neutrinos and unveil their mysterious behavior.
“Typically, the RRB meetings are held at Fermilab,” Fleming said. “We wanted to take the opportunity to bring the RRB members to SURF to let them see the facility and the place where the DUNE far detector will be.”
At SURF, the excavation of the huge underground complex for LBNF is about 60% complete. Construction crews have been hard at work carving out the extensive network of tunnels and caverns, which will cover about the size of eight soccer fields when complete. Two of the three caverns will be about 28 meters (92 feet) tall. They will provide space for four enormous detector modules that will be filled with a total of 70,000 tons of liquid argon, a highly stable element ideal for studying neutrino interactions.
Excavation of the tunnels and three large caverns for the DUNE detector in South Dakota is about 60% complete. Credit: Photo: Matthew Kapust, Sanford Underground Research Facility.
Work on components for the first two detector modules is moving forward at a rapid pace. DUNE members around the world have been busy building and testing prototypes of the underlying detector technology. The mass production of components for the first detector module has begun. They will be shipped to SURF and lowered underground. In the caverns, they will be assembled piece by piece — in a manner akin to putting together a ship in a bottle.
“The excavation is going beyond expectation, paralleled by similar progress in the testing and building of the far detector modules,” says DUNE co-spokesperson Sergio Bertolucci, former director of research at CERN and RRB member.
“Two years from now, SURF will see a team of enthused engineers, technicians and physicists building this big ship in a bottle.”
During the meeting, which will take a hybrid format, the RRB members will receive updates on the status of the project and coordinate tasks. RRB members joining onsite will receive a tour of the excavation site as well.
See the full article here .
Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.
five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.
The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been operated by the Fermi Research Alliance, a joint venture of the University of Chicago, and the Universities Research Association (URA). Fermilab is a part of the Illinois Technology and Research Corridor.
Fermilab’s Tevatron was a landmark particle accelerator; until the startup in 2008 of the Large Hadron Collider(CH) near Geneva, Switzerland, it was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, accelerating antiprotons to energies of 500 GeV, and producing proton-proton collisions with energies of up to 1.6 TeV, the first accelerator to reach one “tera-electron-volt” energy. At 3.9 miles (6.3 km), it was the world’s fourth-largest particle accelerator in circumference. One of its most important achievements was the 1995 discovery of the top quark, announced by research teams using the Tevatron’s CDF and DØ detectors. It was shut down in 2011.
__________________________________________________________
[Earlier than the LHC at CERN, The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory had sought the Higgs with the Tevatron Accelerator.
But the Tevatron could barely muster 2 TeV [Terraelectron volts], not enough energy to find the Higgs. CERN’s LHC is capable of 13 TeV.
Another possible attempt in the U.S. would have been the Super Conducting Supercollider.
Fermilab has gone on to become a world powerhouse in neutrino research with the LBNF/DUNE project which will send neutrinos 800 miles to SURF-The Sanford Underground Research Facility in in Lead, South Dakota.
__________________________________________________
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE LBNF from FNAL to Sanford Underground Research Facility, Lead, South Dakota.
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE/ LBNF Caverns at Sanford Underground Research Facility.
__________________________________________________
In addition to high-energy collider physics, Fermilab hosts fixed-target and neutrino experiments, such as MicroBooNE (Micro Booster Neutrino Experiment), NOνA (NuMI Off-Axis νe Appearance) and SeaQuest. Completed neutrino experiments include MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search), MINOS+, MiniBooNE and SciBooNE (SciBar Booster Neutrino Experiment). The MiniBooNE detector was a 40-foot (12 m) diameter sphere containing 800 tons of mineral oil lined with 1,520 phototube detectors. An estimated 1 million neutrino events were recorded each year. SciBooNE sat in the same neutrino beam as MiniBooNE but had fine-grained tracking capabilities. The NOνA experiment uses, and the MINOS experiment used, Fermilab’s NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) beam, which is an intense beam of neutrinos that travels 455 miles (732 km) through the Earth to the Soudan Mine in Minnesota and the Ash River, Minnesota, site of the NOνA far detector. In 2017, the ICARUS neutrino experiment was moved from CERN to Fermilab.
In the public realm, Fermilab is home to a native prairie ecosystem restoration project and hosts many cultural events: public science lectures and symposia, classical and contemporary music concerts, folk dancing and arts galleries. The site is open from dawn to dusk to visitors who present valid photo identification.
Asteroid 11998 Fermilab is named in honor of the laboratory.
Weston, Illinois, was a community next to Batavia voted out of existence by its village board in 1966 to provide a site for Fermilab.
The laboratory was founded in 1969 as the National Accelerator Laboratory; it was renamed in honor of Enrico Fermi in 1974. The laboratory’s first director was Robert Rathbun Wilson, under whom the laboratory opened ahead of time and under budget. Many of the sculptures on the site are of his creation. He is the namesake of the site’s high-rise laboratory building, whose unique shape has become the symbol for Fermilab and which is the center of activity on the campus.
After Wilson stepped down in 1978 to protest the lack of funding for the lab, Leon M. Lederman took on the job. It was under his guidance that the original accelerator was replaced with the Tevatron, an accelerator capable of colliding protons and antiprotons at a combined energy of 1.96 TeV. Lederman stepped down in 1989. The science education center at the site was named in his honor.
The later directors include:
John Peoples, 1989 to 1996
Michael S. Witherell, July 1999 to June 2005
Piermaria Oddone, July 2005 to July 2013
Nigel Lockyer, September 2013 to the present
Fermilab continues to participate in the work at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC); it serves as a Tier 1 site in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.
richardmitnick
From The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory : “DUNE collaboration ready to ramp up mass production for first detector module”
FNAL Art Image by Angela Gonzales
From The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to High Energy Physics [HEP] scientific research worldwide.
3.30.23
Diana Kwon
Preparations for the construction of the first detector module of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment [below] are rapidly progressing. Members of the international DUNE collaboration have begun the final tests of detector components that will be shipped to South Dakota. There they will become part of a one-of-a-kind experiment designed to study some of the most elusive particles in the universe: neutrinos.
DUNE is an experiment aimed at exploring the nature of neutrinos. Scientists hope that unlocking the secrets of these particles will shed light on some of the biggest mysteries in physics, such as why the universe is made of matter and how neutron stars and black holes are forged in the aftermath of exploding stars.
DUNE, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, will be housed at two locations: the Fermilab site in Illinois and the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. The far detector, an enormous structure envisioned to ultimately comprise four modules, will be located 1.5 kilometers underground at SURF.
Each module will be a liquid-argon time projection chamber, or LArTPC, designed to be filled with 17,000 tons of argon, an element commonly found in air that is ideal for studying neutrinos.
The construction of wire planes, called anode plane assemblies, is underway at Daresbury Laboratory in the U.K.The laboratory will ship 136 APAs to South Dakota for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Photo: DUNE collaboration.
The first DUNE detector module to be built at SURF will employ horizontal drift technology. When neutrinos collide with the argon atoms inside the module, they will produce charged particles. These charged particles knock out electrons as they travel through the argon. The electrons are attracted by a strong electric field towards anode plane assemblies, or APAs, which record a projection of where the electrons were produced. By measuring the timing of when electrons hit the APAs, scientists are able to reconstruct three-dimensional particle tracks.
When complete, the first detector module will contain 150 APAs, each a large rectangular plane approximately 2.3 meters by 6 meters in size and composed of tightly wound copper-beryllium wires. “We are going to effectively plaster a wall with a grid of wires,” said Justin Evans, a professor of physics at the University of Manchester. He is leading the effort to build APAs in the U.K.
The technology for the first module was successfully tested in a scaled-down version called ProtoDUNE at the CERN Neutrino Platform in 2019.
Although it was only one-twentieth of the size to the final DUNE detector module, it still was the largest LArTPC ever constructed and operated.
“That was the first time that we in the U.K. built any of these wire grids and took data from them,” said Evans. “And they worked wonderfully.”
In addition to proving that the detector technology would work, the horizontal drift prototype revealed where design improvements could be made. With this in mind, scientists designed ProtoDUNE II, an upgraded prototype that will undergo tests at CERN this year.
“With a prototype, there’s always lessons learned,” said Thomas Wieber, the installation team leader at CERN. “We want to prove that what we think is going to work better actually does work better.”
DUNE scientists are also working on developing the technology for a vertical drift detector, which is the planned technology for the second far detector module. Preparations for testing the new technology in a separate prototype detector, known as vertical drift module-0, are underway at CERN as well.
Testing the full assembly process
Testing all aspects of the horizontal drift module assembly also involves ensuring that all the detector components, which come from DUNE collaborators around the world, will arrive safely. To ensure this process goes smoothly, ProtoDUNE II also has served as a testbed for the installation process. The groups involved in manufacturing the detector components brought all their test parts together at CERN to assemble and test the prototype.
“We have had collaborators coming in from all over the world,” said Daniela Macina, the installation coordinator for the horizontal drift detector at CERN. “This is the first time we’ve integrated and installed the final DUNE horizontal drift detectors all together.”
ProtoDUNE II contains four APAs. All four were tested in a cold box filled with super-cold gaseous nitrogen in order to ensure that the electronics function properly at frigid temperatures. All four APAs passed the test. They then were assembled in the ProtoDUNE II cryostat, along with other parts of the prototype. These parts include the electronics and light sensors, which identify photons that are released when neutrinos interact with the liquid argon in the detector.
The DUNE collaboration has finished the assembly of their large horizontal drift prototype detector, known as ProtoDUNE II, at CERN. It is the final test before ramping up mass production of DUNE detector components. Photo: DUNE collaboration.
“We needed to assemble things according to a procedure that will be as close as possible to the one we’ll use in South Dakota,” Macina said.
Later this year, the team will fill ProtoDUNE II with liquid argon and shoot a beam of particles through the detector to test it. “We don’t expect big surprises, because there were only minor changes between ProtoDUNE and ProtoDUNE II,” said Macina.
As the final work on ProtoDUNE II takes place at CERN, scientists are also ramping up production of the APAs that will be installed at SURF. Of the 150 APAs that will be installed in the first module of the far detector, 136 APAs will be produced at the Daresbury Laboratory in the U.K., and another 14 will be produced at the University of Chicago.
To support the mass production of these parts, the Daresbury Laboratory in the U.K. has constructed an APA factory where the team has set up four production lines, each with six-meter-long machines for winding the wires around steel frames to create the APAs.
“We have four of those set up, all working in parallel,” Evans said. “We’re trying to get to the point where each production line can produce one APA every two months.”
Shipping detector components to South Dakota
Activities related to the detector installation have also started up in South Dakota, where the excavation of the caverns for the DUNE far detector are about 60% complete.
In early November, the team shipped one of the APAs from the first prototype at CERN to SURF for a logistics test. The process of transporting the long, rectangular APA from Europe to the United States, offloading the structure, then lowering it a mile below the ground through a relatively narrow mineshaft was successfully completed.
“We’re using older APAs to validate those procedures so that we’re not going to damage anything when we start bringing the real APAs to SURF,” said Fermilab scientist Eric James, a technical coordinator who focuses on DUNE’s horizontal drift detector.
Despite all the details that need to be worked out to bring the first DUNE detector module to life, DUNE scientists are not losing sight of their ultimate goal: exploring a new frontier of neutrino science.
“I’m hugely excited about what we will see when we switch this thing on,” Evans said. “There is so much the neutrino can tell us about the universe.”
See the full article here .
Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.
five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.
The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been operated by the Fermi Research Alliance, a joint venture of the University of Chicago, and the Universities Research Association (URA). Fermilab is a part of the Illinois Technology and Research Corridor.
Fermilab’s Tevatron was a landmark particle accelerator; until the startup in 2008 of the Large Hadron Collider(CH) near Geneva, Switzerland, it was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, accelerating antiprotons to energies of 500 GeV, and producing proton-proton collisions with energies of up to 1.6 TeV, the first accelerator to reach one “tera-electron-volt” energy. At 3.9 miles (6.3 km), it was the world’s fourth-largest particle accelerator in circumference. One of its most important achievements was the 1995 discovery of the top quark, announced by research teams using the Tevatron’s CDF and DØ detectors. It was shut down in 2011.
__________________________________________________________
[Earlier than the LHC at CERN, The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory had sought the Higgs with the Tevatron Accelerator.
But the Tevatron could barely muster 2 TeV [Terraelectron volts], not enough energy to find the Higgs. CERN’s LHC is capable of 13 TeV.
Another possible attempt in the U.S. would have been the Super Conducting Supercollider.
Fermilab has gone on to become a world powerhouse in neutrino research with the LBNF/DUNE project which will send neutrinos 800 miles to SURF-The Sanford Underground Research Facility in in Lead, South Dakota.
__________________________________________________
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE LBNF from FNAL to Sanford Underground Research Facility, Lead, South Dakota.
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE/ LBNF Caverns at Sanford Underground Research Facility.
__________________________________________________
In addition to high-energy collider physics, Fermilab hosts fixed-target and neutrino experiments, such as MicroBooNE (Micro Booster Neutrino Experiment), NOνA (NuMI Off-Axis νe Appearance) and SeaQuest. Completed neutrino experiments include MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search), MINOS+, MiniBooNE and SciBooNE (SciBar Booster Neutrino Experiment). The MiniBooNE detector was a 40-foot (12 m) diameter sphere containing 800 tons of mineral oil lined with 1,520 phototube detectors. An estimated 1 million neutrino events were recorded each year. SciBooNE sat in the same neutrino beam as MiniBooNE but had fine-grained tracking capabilities. The NOνA experiment uses, and the MINOS experiment used, Fermilab’s NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) beam, which is an intense beam of neutrinos that travels 455 miles (732 km) through the Earth to the Soudan Mine in Minnesota and the Ash River, Minnesota, site of the NOνA far detector. In 2017, the ICARUS neutrino experiment was moved from CERN to Fermilab.
In the public realm, Fermilab is home to a native prairie ecosystem restoration project and hosts many cultural events: public science lectures and symposia, classical and contemporary music concerts, folk dancing and arts galleries. The site is open from dawn to dusk to visitors who present valid photo identification.
Asteroid 11998 Fermilab is named in honor of the laboratory.
Weston, Illinois, was a community next to Batavia voted out of existence by its village board in 1966 to provide a site for Fermilab.
The laboratory was founded in 1969 as the National Accelerator Laboratory; it was renamed in honor of Enrico Fermi in 1974. The laboratory’s first director was Robert Rathbun Wilson, under whom the laboratory opened ahead of time and under budget. Many of the sculptures on the site are of his creation. He is the namesake of the site’s high-rise laboratory building, whose unique shape has become the symbol for Fermilab and which is the center of activity on the campus.
After Wilson stepped down in 1978 to protest the lack of funding for the lab, Leon M. Lederman took on the job. It was under his guidance that the original accelerator was replaced with the Tevatron, an accelerator capable of colliding protons and antiprotons at a combined energy of 1.96 TeV. Lederman stepped down in 1989. The science education center at the site was named in his honor.
The later directors include:
John Peoples, 1989 to 1996
Michael S. Witherell, July 1999 to June 2005
Piermaria Oddone, July 2005 to July 2013
Nigel Lockyer, September 2013 to the present
Fermilab continues to participate in the work at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC); it serves as a Tier 1 site in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.
richardmitnick
From The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory : “DUNE collaboration tests new technology for second detector module”
FNAL Art Image by Angela Gonzales
From The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to High Energy Physics [HEP] scientific research worldwide.
3.30.23
Diana Kwon
In recent months, the neutrino research facility at the European laboratory CERN has been bustling with activity. Scientists, engineers and technicians from around the world have gathered there to assemble a large prototype of a new particle detector to study the neutrino, one of the most mysterious types of particles in the universe.
Neutrinos are everywhere, but they rarely interact with matter. Each second, trillions of these particles traverse our bodies and leave without a trace. By studying these ghost-like particles, physicists hope to answer questions, such as: Why is the universe made of matter? What is the relationship between the four forces of nature? How are black holes formed in the aftermath of an exploding star?
Researchers working on the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment [below], hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, hope to solve these mysteries. Their work on the prototype detector at CERN brings them a step closer to achieving this goal.
A crane lowers a charge readout plane attached to the top of the cryogenic vessel onto the vessel. Photo: DUNE collaboration.
The infrastructure needed for DUNE is expansive. It includes a new particle accelerator at Fermilab, which will produce a neutrino beam that will pass through 1,300 kilometers of earth before reaching the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. At SURF, these particles will be greeted by the DUNE far detector, a gigantic subterranean detector housed 1.5 kilometers below the surface.
The detector will comprise huge detector modules containing argon, an element whose highly stable nature makes it perfect for studying neutrinos. Excavation of the underground caverns for the DUNE far detector is about 60% complete.
Testing new technology
Members of the DUNE collaboration, which includes scientists and engineers from more than 35 countries, are busy at work designing, testing and building the components of the first two DUNE detector modules to be installed at SURF. Module one will be a horizontal drift detector, which is based on a tried-and-tested technique that will be scaled up for DUNE. The mass production of components for this first module already has begun. The second module, known as the vertical drift detector, will feature new technology. Testing has been ongoing for the last two years.
“I expect exciting physics out of both the horizontal and vertical drift detectors,” said Steve Kettell, the technical coordinator for the vertical drift detector, based at the DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. “But the vertical drift technology opens up significant opportunities for building additional detectors that are lower in cost and easier to install.”
Horizontal vs. vertical
On a basic level, horizontal and vertical drift detectors work in the same way. When a neutrino interacts with an argon atom inside the detector’s liquid-argon-filled chamber, the particles produced in this interaction release electrons. A strong electric field between opposite sides of the detector chamber pushes these loose electrons to an anode, a large structure that detects the arrival of charged particles. In a horizontal drift detector, the electric field exists between two opposing walls, and the electrons drift horizontally; in a vertical drift detector, the electric field runs between the bottom and top of the detector, and the electrons drift vertically. The argon-neutrino interaction also produces a brief flash of light that both detectors capture with a separate photon detection system.
“Fundamentally, there’s nothing different about vertical drift and horizontal drift,” Kettell explained. “We are detecting neutrino events in essentially the same manner.”
The differences are in the details. The anode of the horizontal drift detector consists of large planes of tightly wound wires, known as anode plane assemblies, or APAs. They are 6 meters tall and 2.3 meters wide. The anode of the vertical drift detector, on the other hand, will be composed of charge readout planes, or CRPs. They are large, perforated-printed circuit boards that are 3 meters by 3.5 meters in size and have copper strips printed onto their surfaces. Like the wires in the APAs, the copper strips in the CRPs will collect the drifting electrons.
A close-up of the charge readout planes for the DUNE vertical drift detector. Photo: DUNE collaboration.
The DUNE vertical drift detector will feature multilayer CRPs at the top and at the bottom. “The CRPs have perforated 2.5-millimeter holes, so that electric charge can pass through and go to another layer to get collected,” said Dominique Duchesneau, leader of the CRP consortium and a physicist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Each CRP layer has differently orientated copper strips, he added, which “gives you the possibility to have multiple views of the electrons.”
A key advantage of CRPs is that because they are made of simple metal-plated circuit boards rather than a tight coil of wires, they are cheaper and easier to manufacture and install than APAs.
“With the vertical drift detector, we’re trying to demonstrate that we can build a less expensive detector that works equally well,” Kettell said.
Because the vertical drift detector technology requires fewer elements than the horizontal drift, it provides a larger active volume. A larger active volume means that there will be more space in which particle interactions can be collected, said Inés Gil-Botella, a DUNE physics coordinator based at the Centre for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research in Spain. “You’re maximizing the possibility of seeing neutrino interactions in this liquid argon.”
Another innovation is the photon detection system DUNE scientists plan to build for the vertical drift detector, an upgrade of the ARAPUCA technology developed for the first DUNE far detector module. This new system will cover all four cryostat walls as well as the cathode with photon detection modules. (In contrast, in the horizontal drift detector, the photon detectors only are embedded in the APA planes, behind the wires.) To power and read out the photo sensors on the high-voltage cathode, which is set to 300 kilovolts, the vertical drift team uses a powerful laser that provides power via optical fibers.
In addition, the argon within the vertical drift detector will be doped with xenon to enhance the number of photons that get detected when particles interact with atoms in the liquid —and to enhance the uniformity of light detection throughout the chamber. Together, these features will make this photon detection system more capable of detecting low-energy physics events, such as those triggered by supernovae or solar neutrino events, Gil-Botella said.
A bustle of activity
The team working on the DUNE vertical drift detector comes from around the world. Major contributions are being made by CERN, France, Italy, Spain and the U.S. But members also come from several other countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America. “There’s been tremendous progress on many fronts,” said Kettell.
This group has been busy. To date, they have successfully tested small-scale, 32-centimeter-by-32-centimeter CRPs in a 50-liter liquid-argon-filled chamber fitted with a cathode, electronics and a photon detection system. This early prototype was able to collect data from cosmic-ray tracks with “good signal-to-noise performance,” said Kettell. They have also tested full-size, 3-meter by 3.5-meter CRPs with the cathode, electronics, and the photon detection system in a large coldbox at CERN.
The team has demonstrated that the components of the vertical drift detector could read out signals at 300 kilovolts — the high voltage that will be needed for creating the electric field in the full-sized DUNE detector. They have also shown that electrons can drift six meters — the maximum distance electrons will travel in the final-size module — and use the CRPs to receive these tracks. “The next big milestone we’ll face is the installation of all of the systems together at a larger scale,” Gil-Botella said.
The team is now assembling parts into a larger vertical drift prototype, dubbed “vertical drift module-0,” in a large cryogenic vessel at CERN, about the size of a small house. This prototype will contain two full-sized CRPs on both the top and bottom of the detector, with the cathode installed in the middle, as well as an advanced photon detection system. Electrons knocked loose in the upper half of the detector will drift upward toward the CRP set at the top, and electrons produced in the lower half will drift in the down direction, until they reach the CRP layers at the bottom. CRP development has been led by France, with the construction of the top CRPs in France and the bottom CRPs in the U.S.
The DUNE researchers aim to complete the installation of the vertical drift prototype detector in spring 2023. Once complete, the team will fill the detector with liquid argon and turn it on, so that scientists can observe the tracks left by particle beams and cosmic rays that pass through it.
Ultimately, the goal is to have the components of the vertical drift detector ready to be installed in one of the large caverns in South Dakota in 2027.
“What I really would like to see is the installation of the first CRPs in the big cryostat at SURF, which will come in several years,” Duchesneau said. “In the meantime, I think module-0 running and taking data in the real configuration of the vertical drift is a very exciting step.”
This newly designed high-voltage extender helps create a 300,000-volt electric field between the top and bottom of the vertical drift prototype detector. Photo: DUNE collaboration
See the full article here .
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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.
The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been operated by the Fermi Research Alliance, a joint venture of the University of Chicago, and the Universities Research Association (URA). Fermilab is a part of the Illinois Technology and Research Corridor.
Fermilab’s Tevatron was a landmark particle accelerator; until the startup in 2008 of the Large Hadron Collider(CH) near Geneva, Switzerland, it was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, accelerating antiprotons to energies of 500 GeV, and producing proton-proton collisions with energies of up to 1.6 TeV, the first accelerator to reach one “tera-electron-volt” energy. At 3.9 miles (6.3 km), it was the world’s fourth-largest particle accelerator in circumference. One of its most important achievements was the 1995 discovery of the top quark, announced by research teams using the Tevatron’s CDF and DØ detectors. It was shut down in 2011.
__________________________________________________________
[Earlier than the LHC at CERN, The DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory had sought the Higgs with the Tevatron Accelerator.
But the Tevatron could barely muster 2 TeV [Terraelectron volts], not enough energy to find the Higgs. CERN’s LHC is capable of 13 TeV.
Another possible attempt in the U.S. would have been the Super Conducting Supercollider.
Fermilab has gone on to become a world powerhouse in neutrino research with the LBNF/DUNE project which will send neutrinos 800 miles to SURF-The Sanford Underground Research Facility in in Lead, South Dakota.
__________________________________________________
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE LBNF from FNAL to Sanford Underground Research Facility, Lead, South Dakota.
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE/ LBNF Caverns at Sanford Underground Research Facility.
__________________________________________________
In addition to high-energy collider physics, Fermilab hosts fixed-target and neutrino experiments, such as MicroBooNE (Micro Booster Neutrino Experiment), NOνA (NuMI Off-Axis νe Appearance) and SeaQuest. Completed neutrino experiments include MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search), MINOS+, MiniBooNE and SciBooNE (SciBar Booster Neutrino Experiment). The MiniBooNE detector was a 40-foot (12 m) diameter sphere containing 800 tons of mineral oil lined with 1,520 phototube detectors. An estimated 1 million neutrino events were recorded each year. SciBooNE sat in the same neutrino beam as MiniBooNE but had fine-grained tracking capabilities. The NOνA experiment uses, and the MINOS experiment used, Fermilab’s NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) beam, which is an intense beam of neutrinos that travels 455 miles (732 km) through the Earth to the Soudan Mine in Minnesota and the Ash River, Minnesota, site of the NOνA far detector. In 2017, the ICARUS neutrino experiment was moved from CERN to Fermilab.
In the public realm, Fermilab is home to a native prairie ecosystem restoration project and hosts many cultural events: public science lectures and symposia, classical and contemporary music concerts, folk dancing and arts galleries. The site is open from dawn to dusk to visitors who present valid photo identification.
Asteroid 11998 Fermilab is named in honor of the laboratory.
Weston, Illinois, was a community next to Batavia voted out of existence by its village board in 1966 to provide a site for Fermilab.
The laboratory was founded in 1969 as the National Accelerator Laboratory; it was renamed in honor of Enrico Fermi in 1974. The laboratory’s first director was Robert Rathbun Wilson, under whom the laboratory opened ahead of time and under budget. Many of the sculptures on the site are of his creation. He is the namesake of the site’s high-rise laboratory building, whose unique shape has become the symbol for Fermilab and which is the center of activity on the campus.
After Wilson stepped down in 1978 to protest the lack of funding for the lab, Leon M. Lederman took on the job. It was under his guidance that the original accelerator was replaced with the Tevatron, an accelerator capable of colliding protons and antiprotons at a combined energy of 1.96 TeV. Lederman stepped down in 1989. The science education center at the site was named in his honor.
The later directors include:
John Peoples, 1989 to 1996
Michael S. Witherell, July 1999 to June 2005
Piermaria Oddone, July 2005 to July 2013
Nigel Lockyer, September 2013 to the present
Fermilab continues to participate in the work at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC); it serves as a Tier 1 site in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.
richardmitnick
From The School of Arts & Sciences At The University of Pennsylvania Via “Penn Today” : “Five things to know – Recent breakthrough in neutrino detection”
From The School of Arts & Sciences
At
The University of Pennsylvania
Via
3.27.23
Nathi Magubane
Research by Joshua Klein of the School of Arts & Science and an international team has found a way to detect distant subatomic particles using water.
A view inside the SNO detector when filled with water. In the background, there are 9,000 photomultiplier tubes that detect photons and the acrylic vessel that (now) holds liquid scintillator. The ropes that crisscross on the outside hold it down when the scintillator is added, to prevent it from floating upwards. The acrylic vessel is 12 m wide, which is about half of the width of Olympic-sized swimming pools. The facility is located in SNOLAB, a research facility located 2km underground near Sudbury, Canada. (Image: SNO+ Collaboration)
Research published in the journal Physical Review Letters [below] conducted by an international team of scientists including Joshua Klein, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor in the School of Arts & Sciences, has resulted in a significant breakthrough in detecting neutrinos.
The international collaborative experiment known as Sudbury Neutrino Observation (SNO+), located in a mine in Sudbury, Ontario, roughly 240km (about 149.13 mi) from the nearest nuclear reactor, has detected subatomic particles, known as antineutrinos, using pure water. Klein notes that prior experiments have done this with a liquid scintillator, an oil-like medium that produces a lot of light when charged particles like electrons or protons pass through it.
“Given that the detector needs to be 240km, about half the length of New York state, away from the reactor, large amounts of scintillator are needed, which can be very expensive,” Klein says. “So, our work shows that very large detectors could be built to do this with just water.”
What neutrinos and antineutrinos are and why you should care
Klein explains that neutrinos and antineutrinos are tiny subatomic particles that are the most abundant particles in the universe and considered fundamental building blocks of matter, but scientists have had difficulty detecting them due to their sparse interactions with other matter and because they cannot be shielded, meaning they can pass through any and everything. But that doesn’t mean they’re harmful or radioactive: Nearly 100 trillion neutrinos pass through our bodies every second without notice.
These properties, however, also make these elusive particles useful for understanding a range of physical phenomena, such as the formation of the universe and the study of distant astronomical objects, and they “have practical applications as they can be used to monitor nuclear reactors and potentially detect the clandestine nuclear activities,” Klein says.
Where they come from
While neutrinos are typically produced by high energy reactions like nuclear reactions in stars, such as the fusion of hydrogen into helium in the sun wherein protons and other particles collide and release neutrinos as a byproduct, antineutrinos, Klein says, are usually produced artificially, “for instance, nuclear reactors, which, to split atomic nuclei, produce antineutrinos as a result of radioactive beta decay from the reaction,” he says. “As such, nuclear reactors produce large amounts of antineutrinos and make them an ideal source for studying them.”
Why this latest finding is a breakthrough
“So, monitoring reactors by measuring their antineutrinos tells us whether they are on or off,” Klein says, “and perhaps even what nuclear fuel they are burning.”
Klein explains that a reactor in a foreign country could therefore be monitored to see if that country is switching from a power-generating reactor to one that is making weapons-grade material. Making the assessment with water alone means an array of large but inexpensive reactors could be built to ensure that a country is adhering to its commitments in a nuclear weapons treaty, for example; it is a handle on ensuring nuclear nonproliferation.
Why this hasn’t been done before
“Reactor antineutrinos are very low in energy, and thus a detector must be very clean from even trace amounts of radioactivity,” Klein says. “In addition, the detector must be able to ‘trigger’ at a low enough threshold that the events can be detected.”
He says that, for a reactor as far away as 240km, it’s particularly important that the reactor contain at least 1,000 tons of water. SNO+ satisfied all these criteria.
Leading the charge
Klein credits his former trainees Tanner Kaptanglu and Logan Lebanowski for spearheading this effort. While the idea for this measurement formed part of Kaptanglu’s doctoral thesis, Lebanowski, a former postdoctoral researcher, oversaw the operation.
“With our instrumentation group here, we designed and built all the data acquisition electronics and developed the detector ‘trigger’ system, which is what allowed SNO+ to have an energy threshold low enough to detect the reactor antineutrinos.”
Capital construction funds for the SNO+ experiment were provided by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and matching partners. SNOLAB operations are supported by the CFI and the Province of Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, with underground access provided by Vale at the Creighton mine site.
The research was funded by the Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Physics, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration through the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium.
See the full article here .
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The University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences is the academic institution encompassing the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
Formerly known as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the School of Arts and Sciences is an umbrella organization that is divided into three main academic components: The College of Arts & Sciences is Penn’s undergraduate liberal arts school. The Graduate Division offers post-undergraduate M.A., M.S., and Ph.D. programs. Finally, the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, originally called “College of General Studies”, is Penn’s continuing and professional education division, catered to working professionals.
The School of Arts and Sciences contains the following departments:
Africana Studies
Anthropology
Biology
Chemistry
Classical Studies
Criminology
Earth and Environmental Science
East Asian Languages & Civilizations
Economics
English
Germanic Languages and Literatures
History
History and Sociology of Science
History of Art
Linguistics
Mathematics
Music
Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations
Philosophy
Physics and Astronomy
Political Science
Psychology
Religious Studies
Romance Languages
Russian and East European Studies
Sociology
South Asia Studies
Academic life at University of Pennsylvania is unparalleled, with 100 countries and every U.S. state represented in one of the Ivy League’s most diverse student bodies. Consistently ranked among the top 10 universities in the country, Penn enrolls 10,000 undergraduate students and welcomes an additional 10,000 students to our world-renowned graduate and professional schools.
Penn’s award-winning educators and scholars encourage students to pursue inquiry and discovery, follow their passions, and address the world’s most challenging problems through an interdisciplinary approach.
The University of Pennsylvania is a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The university claims a founding date of 1740 and is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered prior to the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin, Penn’s founder and first president, advocated an educational program that trained leaders in commerce, government, and public service, similar to a modern liberal arts curriculum.
Penn has four undergraduate schools as well as twelve graduate and professional schools. Schools enrolling undergraduates include the College of Arts and Sciences; the School of Engineering and Applied Science; the Wharton School; and the School of Nursing. Penn’s “One University Policy” allows students to enroll in classes in any of Penn’s twelve schools. Among its highly ranked graduate and professional schools are a law school whose first professor wrote the first draft of the United States Constitution, the first school of medicine in North America (Perelman School of Medicine, 1765), and the first collegiate business school (Wharton School, 1881).
Penn is also home to the first “student union” building and organization (Houston Hall, 1896), the first Catholic student club in North America (Newman Center, 1893), the first double-decker college football stadium (Franklin Field, 1924 when second deck was constructed), and Morris Arboretum, the official arboretum of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The first general-purpose electronic computer (ENIAC) was developed at Penn and formally dedicated in 1946. In 2019, the university had an endowment of $14.65 billion, the sixth-largest endowment of all universities in the United States, as well as a research budget of $1.02 billion. The university’s athletics program, the Quakers, fields varsity teams in 33 sports as a member of the NCAA Division I Ivy League conference.
As of 2018, distinguished alumni and/or Trustees include three U.S. Supreme Court justices; 32 U.S. senators; 46 U.S. governors; 163 members of the U.S. House of Representatives; eight signers of the Declaration of Independence and seven signers of the U.S. Constitution (four of whom signed both representing two-thirds of the six people who signed both); 24 members of the Continental Congress; 14 foreign heads of state and two presidents of the United States, including Donald Trump. As of October 2019, 36 Nobel laureates; 80 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; 64 billionaires; 29 Rhodes Scholars; 15 Marshall Scholars and 16 Pulitzer Prize winners have been affiliated with the university.
History
The University of Pennsylvania considers itself the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, though this is contested by Princeton University and Columbia University. The university also considers itself as the first university in the United States with both undergraduate and graduate studies.
In 1740, a group of Philadelphians joined together to erect a great preaching hall for the traveling evangelist George Whitefield, who toured the American colonies delivering open-air sermons. The building was designed and built by Edmund Woolley and was the largest building in the city at the time, drawing thousands of people the first time it was preached in. It was initially planned to serve as a charity school as well, but a lack of funds forced plans for the chapel and school to be suspended. According to Franklin’s autobiography, it was in 1743 when he first had the idea to establish an academy, “thinking the Rev. Richard Peters a fit person to superintend such an institution”. However, Peters declined a casual inquiry from Franklin and nothing further was done for another six years. In the fall of 1749, now more eager to create a school to educate future generations, Benjamin Franklin circulated a pamphlet titled Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, his vision for what he called a “Public Academy of Philadelphia”. Unlike the other colonial colleges that existed in 1749—Harvard University, William & Mary, Yale Unversity, and The College of New Jersey—Franklin’s new school would not focus merely on education for the clergy. He advocated an innovative concept of higher education, one which would teach both the ornamental knowledge of the arts and the practical skills necessary for making a living and doing public service. The proposed program of study could have become the nation’s first modern liberal arts curriculum, although it was never implemented because Anglican priest William Smith (1727-1803), who became the first provost, and other trustees strongly preferred the traditional curriculum.
Franklin assembled a board of trustees from among the leading citizens of Philadelphia, the first such non-sectarian board in America. At the first meeting of the 24 members of the board of trustees on November 13, 1749, the issue of where to locate the school was a prime concern. Although a lot across Sixth Street from the old Pennsylvania State House (later renamed and famously known since 1776 as “Independence Hall”), was offered without cost by James Logan, its owner, the trustees realized that the building erected in 1740, which was still vacant, would be an even better site. The original sponsors of the dormant building still owed considerable construction debts and asked Franklin’s group to assume their debts and, accordingly, their inactive trusts. On February 1, 1750, the new board took over the building and trusts of the old board. On August 13, 1751, the “Academy of Philadelphia”, using the great hall at 4th and Arch Streets, took in its first secondary students. A charity school also was chartered on July 13, 1753 by the intentions of the original “New Building” donors, although it lasted only a few years. On June 16, 1755, the “College of Philadelphia” was chartered, paving the way for the addition of undergraduate instruction. All three schools shared the same board of trustees and were considered to be part of the same institution. The first commencement exercises were held on May 17, 1757.
The institution of higher learning was known as the College of Philadelphia from 1755 to 1779. In 1779, not trusting then-provost the Reverend William Smith’s “Loyalist” tendencies, the revolutionary State Legislature created a University of the State of Pennsylvania. The result was a schism, with Smith continuing to operate an attenuated version of the College of Philadelphia. In 1791, the legislature issued a new charter, merging the two institutions into a new University of Pennsylvania with twelve men from each institution on the new board of trustees.
Penn has three claims to being the first university in the United States, according to university archives director Mark Frazier Lloyd: the 1765 founding of the first medical school in America made Penn the first institution to offer both “undergraduate” and professional education; the 1779 charter made it the first American institution of higher learning to take the name of “University”; and existing colleges were established as seminaries (although, as detailed earlier, Penn adopted a traditional seminary curriculum as well).
After being located in downtown Philadelphia for more than a century, the campus was moved across the Schuylkill River to property purchased from the Blockley Almshouse in West Philadelphia in 1872, where it has since remained in an area now known as University City. Although Penn began operating as an academy or secondary school in 1751 and obtained its collegiate charter in 1755, it initially designated 1750 as its founding date; this is the year that appears on the first iteration of the university seal. Sometime later in its early history, Penn began to consider 1749 as its founding date and this year was referenced for over a century, including at the centennial celebration in 1849. In 1899, the board of trustees voted to adjust the founding date earlier again, this time to 1740, the date of “the creation of the earliest of the many educational trusts the University has taken upon itself”. The board of trustees voted in response to a three-year campaign by Penn’s General Alumni Society to retroactively revise the university’s founding date to appear older than Princeton University, which had been chartered in 1746.
Research, innovations and discoveries
Penn is classified as an “R1” doctoral university: “Highest research activity.” Its economic impact on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for 2015 amounted to $14.3 billion. Penn’s research expenditures in the 2018 fiscal year were $1.442 billion, the fourth largest in the U.S. In fiscal year 2019 Penn received $582.3 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health.
In line with its well-known interdisciplinary tradition, Penn’s research centers often span two or more disciplines. In the 2010–2011 academic year alone, five interdisciplinary research centers were created or substantially expanded; these include the Center for Health-care Financing; the Center for Global Women’s Health at the Nursing School; the $13 million Morris Arboretum’s Horticulture Center; the $15 million Jay H. Baker Retailing Center at Wharton; and the $13 million Translational Research Center at Penn Medicine. With these additions, Penn now counts 165 research centers hosting a research community of over 4,300 faculty and over 1,100 postdoctoral fellows, 5,500 academic support staff and graduate student trainees. To further assist the advancement of interdisciplinary research President Amy Gutmann established the “Penn Integrates Knowledge” title awarded to selected Penn professors “whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge”. These professors hold endowed professorships and joint appointments between Penn’s schools.
Penn is also among the most prolific producers of doctoral students. With 487 PhDs awarded in 2009, Penn ranks third in the Ivy League, only behind Columbia University and Cornell University (Harvard University did not report data). It also has one of the highest numbers of post-doctoral appointees (933 in number for 2004–2007), ranking third in the Ivy League (behind Harvard and Yale University) and tenth nationally.
In most disciplines Penn professors’ productivity is among the highest in the nation and first in the fields of epidemiology, business, communication studies, comparative literature, languages, information science, criminal justice and criminology, social sciences and sociology. According to the National Research Council nearly three-quarters of Penn’s 41 assessed programs were placed in ranges including the top 10 rankings in their fields, with more than half of these in ranges including the top five rankings in these fields.
Penn’s research tradition has historically been complemented by innovations that shaped higher education. In addition to establishing the first medical school; the first university teaching hospital; the first business school; and the first student union Penn was also the cradle of other significant developments. In 1852, Penn Law was the first law school in the nation to publish a law journal still in existence (then called The American Law Register, now the Penn Law Review, one of the most cited law journals in the world). Under the deanship of William Draper Lewis, the law school was also one of the first schools to emphasize legal teaching by full-time professors instead of practitioners, a system that is still followed today. The Wharton School was home to several pioneering developments in business education. It established the first research center in a business school in 1921 and the first center for entrepreneurship center in 1973 and it regularly introduced novel curricula for which BusinessWeek wrote, “Wharton is on the crest of a wave of reinvention and change in management education”.
Several major scientific discoveries have also taken place at Penn. The university is probably best known as the place where the first general-purpose electronic computer (ENIAC) was born in 1946 at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.
ENIAC UPenn
It was here also where the world’s first spelling and grammar checkers were created, as well as the popular COBOL programming language. Penn can also boast some of the most important discoveries in the field of medicine. The dialysis machine used as an artificial replacement for lost kidney function was conceived and devised out of a pressure cooker by William Inouye while he was still a student at Penn Med; the Rubella and Hepatitis B vaccines were developed at Penn; the discovery of cancer’s link with genes; cognitive therapy; Retin-A (the cream used to treat acne), Resistin; the Philadelphia gene (linked to chronic myelogenous leukemia) and the technology behind PET Scans were all discovered by Penn Med researchers. More recent gene research has led to the discovery of the genes for fragile X syndrome, the most common form of inherited mental retardation; spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy, a disorder marked by progressive muscle wasting; and Charcot–Marie–Tooth disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects the hands, feet and limbs.
Conductive polymer was also developed at Penn by Alan J. Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa, an invention that earned them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. On faculty since 1965, Ralph L. Brinster developed the scientific basis for in vitro fertilization and the transgenic mouse at Penn and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2010. The theory of superconductivity was also partly developed at Penn, by then-faculty member John Robert Schrieffer (along with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper). The university has also contributed major advancements in the fields of economics and management. Among the many discoveries are conjoint analysis, widely used as a predictive tool especially in market research; Simon Kuznets’s method of measuring Gross National Product; the Penn effect (the observation that consumer price levels in richer countries are systematically higher than in poorer ones) and the “Wharton Model” developed by Nobel-laureate Lawrence Klein to measure and forecast economic activity. The idea behind Health Maintenance Organizations also belonged to Penn professor Robert Eilers, who put it into practice during then-President Nixon’s health reform in the 1970s.
International partnerships
Students can study abroad for a semester or a year at partner institutions such as the London School of Economics(UK), University of Barcelona [Universitat de Barcelona](ES), Paris Institute of Political Studies [Institut d’études politiques de Paris](FR), University of Queensland(AU), University College London(UK), King’s College London(UK), Hebrew University of Jerusalem(IL) and University of Warwick(UK).
richardmitnick
From The University of Bern [Universität Bern] (CH): “First detection of neutrinos made at a particle collider”
From The University of Bern [Universität Bern] (CH)
3.20.23
Prof. Dr. Akitaka Ariga
University of Bern, Laboratory for High Energy Physics (LHEP)
Phone: +41 31 684 46 04
E-Mail: akitaka.ariga@lhep.unibe.ch
Prof. Dr. Michele Weber
University of Bern, Laboratory for High Energy Physics (LHEP)
Phone: +41 31 684 51 46
E-Mail: michele.weber@lhep.unibe.ch
A team including physicists of the University of Bern has for the first time detected subatomic
particles called neutrinos created by a particle collider, namely at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider
(LHC). The discovery promises to deepen scientists’ understanding of the nature of neutrinos,
which are among the most abundant particles in the universe and key to the solution of the
question why there is more matter than antimatter.
Neutrinos are fundamental particles that played an important role in the early phase of the universe.
They are key to learn more about the fundamental laws of nature, including how particles acquire mass
and why there is more matter than antimatter. Despite being among the most abundant particles in the
universe they are very difficult to detect because they pass through matter with almost no interaction.
They are therefore often called “ghost particles”.
Neutrinos have been known for several decades and were very important for establishing the standard
model of particle physics. But most neutrinos studied by physicists so far have been low-energy
neutrinos. Previously, no neutrino produced at a particle collider had ever been detected by an
experiment. Now, an international team including researchers from the Laboratory for High Energy
Physics (LHEP) of the University of Bern has succeeded in doing just that. Using the FASER particle
detector at CERN in Geneva, the team was able to detect very high energy neutrinos produced by
brand a new source: CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The international FASER collaboration announced this result on March 19 at the MORIOND EW conference in La Thuile, Italy.
FASER enables investigation of high energy neutrinos
The properties of neutrinos have been studied in numerous experiments since their discovery in 1956 by Clyde L. Cowan and Frederick Reines. One of the leading experiments to study neutrinos is the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) being built in the USA.
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE LBNF from FNAL to Sanford Underground Research Facility, Lead, South Dakota in de velopment.
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE/ LBNF Caverns at Sanford Underground Research Facility.
The University of Bern is a key contributor. Experiments like DUNE are general purpose and can study many properties of neutrinos from a variety of sources. One aspect that is not covered is very high energy neutrinos. The highest energy accelerator available is the LHC at CERN, where new particles are produced by two beams of protons smashing together at extremely high energy. However, neutrinos have never been detected at any collider because they escape the existing detectors at the LHC.
The FASER experiment was proposed to fill this gap. “In this experiment we measure very high energy neutrinos produced by the LHC collider at CERN. The goal is to study how these neutrinos are produced, what their properties are and to look for signals of new particles,” says Akitaka Ariga, leader of the FASER group at University of Bern’s Laboratory for High Energy Physics (LHEP). The LHEP is part of the Physics Institute and of the Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics (AEC). “The FASER experiment is a unique idea at the interface between the highest energy colliders and neutrino
physics. Often new discoveries are made when taking such new approaches,” says Michele Weber, director of the LHEP of the University of Bern.
Hidden physics in neutrinos?
For the current observation of neutrinos, the experiment took data at the LHC in 2022. The team detected 153 events that are neutrino interactions with extremely high certainty. The neutrinos detected by FASER are of the highest energy ever produced in a lab and are similar to the neutrinos coming from deep-space that trigger dramatic particle showers in our atmosphere or the earth. They are therefore also an important tool to researchers for better understanding observations in particle astrophysics.
“This achievement is a historical milestone for obtaining a new neutrino source with unexplored features,” says Akitaka Ariga. The presented result is just the very beginning of a series of explorations. The experiment will continue to take data till the end of 2025. “There might be hidden physics in neutrinos at high energy scale,” says Akitaka Ariga.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 101002690, FASERnu).
See the full article here .
Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.
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The University of Bern [Universität Bern] (CH) is a university in the Swiss capital of Bern and was founded in 1834. It is regulated and financed by the Canton of Bern. It is a comprehensive university offering a broad choice of courses and programs in eight faculties and some 150 institutes. With around 17,512 students, Universität Bern is the third biggest University in Switzerland.
Universität Bern operates at three levels: university, faculties and institutes. Other organizational units include interfaculty and general university units. The university’s highest governing body is the Senate, which is responsible for issuing statutes, rules and regulations. Directly answerable to the Senate is the University Board of Directors, the governing body for university management and coordination. The Board comprises the Rector, the Vice-Rectors and the Administrative Director. The structures and functions of the University Board of Directors and the other organizational units are regulated by the Universities Act. Universität Bern offers about 39 bachelor and 72 master programs, with enrollments of 7,747 and 4,523, respectively. The university also has 2,776 doctoral students. Around 1,561 bachelor, 1,489 master’s degree students and 570 PhD students graduate each year. For some time now, the university has had more female than male students; at the end of 2016, women accounted for 56% of students.
Today the University of Bern is one of the top 150 universities in the world. In the QS World University Rankings 2019 it ranked 139th. The Shanghai Ranking (ARWU) 2018 ranked the University of Bern in the range 101st–150th in the world. In the Leiden Ranking 2015 it ranked 122nd in the world and 50th in Europe. In the Times Higher Education World University Rankings it ranked 110th in 2018/2019 and 2016/2017 (and 82nd in Clinical, pre-clinical & health 2017).
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From “Symmetry”: “How to put together an international physics experiment”
3.14.23
Madeleine O’Keefe
Illustration by Sandbox Studio, Chicago with Steve Shanabruch.
To build the DUNE neutrino experiment and its associated accelerator upgrade, experts invent customized ways to transport fragile, expensive and highly specialized components.
On a late-September day, in the high-bay building of Daresbury Laboratory in the United Kingdom, Jeremiah Holzbauer found himself with a problem: Gallons of water from an overnight downpour had unexpectedly collected in the lifting pockets of a 14-ton concrete block he was responsible for getting from Chicago to Daresbury and back.
Apparently, the two overlapping tarps used to cover the block’s custom transportation frame were insufficient defense against the elements.
The team at Daresbury Lab had one day to disassemble the frame, examine its condition and the condition of its concrete cargo, then reassemble it all and send it back to Chicago. If rain had penetrated during the first leg of the trip, Holzbauer wanted to see if it would happen again during the return—but first, he had to get this rainwater out. He had nothing on hand to bail out the block beyond a small cup. So that’s what he used.
Luckily, and ironically, Holzbauer and his team were in the middle of a “dry” run, a test of the transportation system that they will use to shuttle massive but delicate cryomodules from Daresbury Lab to the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in a suburb of Chicago in the United States. There they will be used in a new particle accelerator that will power a huge neutrino experiment.
The concrete block had the dimensions, weight and mounting points of a real cryomodule; each one is 10 meters long and weighs 27,500 pounds, or 12,500 kilograms. The team was transporting it to see how well the frame they built would protect its cargo from shocks, bumps … and weather.
Transportation tests are just one piece of the logistics required for large international particle physics experiments.
Illustration by Sandbox Studio, Chicago with Steve Shanabruch.
The cryomodules will be used to build a new 215-meter-long particle accelerator at Fermilab as part of the Proton Improvement Plan II, or PIP-II, project. Two different types of cryomodules will be provided by PIP-II partners in the UK and France.
PIP-II is the first particle accelerator to be built in the US with significant in-kind contributions from international partners. Institutions from France, India, Italy and Poland are also providing components, including superconducting cavities, electromagnets, radio-frequency power sources and cryomodule components. In addition, all partnering institutions contribute expertise in design, technology and transportation to PIP-II.
“This is as big as it gets,” says Holzbauer, the PIP-II transportation manager at Fermilab. “This is an order of magnitude more complicated than most other projects, logistically, because you’re shipping between India, the EU and the UK. The transports are longer, there’s a lot more handling steps, customs are much more intensive, and the diversity of equipment is quite significant.”
Holzbauer did not expect to undergo a water displacement exercise during their transportation test. But he’ll know to guard against it when he coordinates the real move: He’s replacing the double tarp with a custom-made single cover.
Holzbauer handles the engineering side of transportation, while the day-to-day logistics are coordinated by PIP-II’s logistics manager at Fermilab, Brian Niesman.
Niesman oversees all PIP-II pieces going in and out of the lab. On a random week in December, for example, Niesman says the collaboration sent niobium sheets and tubes, connectors and switches, spacer rings, magnet shields, support discs, washers, and amplifier parts and components to China, Italy and India. Technicians there will use the pieces to build their components, and then they will send the finished products back to Fermilab, where they will be tested by the PIP-II team.
Most completed components will arrive at Fermilab between 2024 and 2028, but—as exhibited by the cryomodule transport frame—the PIP-II team is already preparing by conducting transportation tests for some of the bigger, more unusual components.
Destination: South Dakota
The particle beam enabled by PIP-II will be sent 800 miles through the earth to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, which will comprise an enormous detector 1.5 kilometers underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, or SURF, in South Dakota.
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Fermilab LBNF/DUNE Collaboration
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE LBNF from FNAL to Sanford Underground Research Facility, Lead, South Dakota.
DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory DUNE/ LBNF Caverns at Sanford Underground Research Facility.
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DUNE will be the most comprehensive neutrino experiment in the world when it starts operating in 2028. DUNE scientists will use data from neutrino collisions to attempt to learn why the universe is matter-dominated, among other scientific goals.
The experiment itself is an even more international effort: Over 1,400 scientists and engineers in more than 35 countries are part of the DUNE collaboration.
The DUNE collaboration comprises more than 10 consortia that are responsible for the production of specific components and systems for the detector, such as photon detectors. The lead institution for each consortium is responsible for the logistics of these partnerships. LBNF/DUNE-US logistics manager Ladia Jakubec is responsible for planning the movement of all components once shipments arrive in South Dakota. He ensures each consortium has the correct information to manage their logistics chain.
Jakubec’s background in commercial shipments helped prepare him for his current position, but he says working to gather the components for a one-of-a-kind scientific experiment is a singular experience. Where shipments of products for large retailers were typically packed in standard cargo containers that could stack and be moved easily, DUNE components are unique sizes and shapes that cannot be placed in conventional containers.
“With a scientific project, these [pieces] are all one-offs,” he says. “You have to develop the logistics chain of custody for that specific piece and then execute it.”
Illustration by Sandbox Studio, Chicago with Steve Shanabruch.
Jakubec and other DUNE collaborators recently tried this successfully for DUNE’s anode plane assemblies, or APAs. The biggest, most expensive and most fragile components of DUNE’s Far Detector, APAs are 6-by-2.3-meter steel monoliths wrapped in a mesh of 15 miles of hair-thin copper-beryllium wires. They will be responsible for collecting the data from neutrino collisions.
Like the cryomodules, the APAs for the detector will be produced at Daresbury Lab. So, the DUNE team had to figure out how to get the APAs from the UK to South Dakota safely, efficiently and on budget.
Olga Beltramello, a mechanical engineer at CERN and head of the compliance office for DUNE, led the design of a frame to transport two APAs at a time. An expert in dynamics, Beltramello calculated all of the different ways the frame could be bumped or rattled on trains, freight carriers, and trucks, on both European and American roads.
Beltramello has a background in aerospace engineering. She was formerly with the European Space Agency, where she designed satellites to withstand the vibrations and various heavy loading during the launching phase. She says the experience has helped prepare her for her current task. “It’s true that it’s like we are transporting a satellite; it is the same type of fragility,” she says.
Beltramello and her colleagues from Fermilab, SURF, CERN and the Manchester University recently tested the APA frame and transportation system in a trial shipment of two prototypes. Similar to the PIP-II test shipment, the APAs needed to get between Daresbury Lab and Fermilab. To start, the DUNE transportation team shipped the pair from Daresbury Lab to CERN, where they installed them in Beltramello’s prototype frame outfitted with shock absorbers and sensors. The team then sent the APAs by train to Liverpool, UK, by ship to Baltimore, US, and by covered truck to Fermilab and then SURF.
The test validated the transportation system, but it also exposed challenges that Beltramello, Jakubec and others must address. For example, at the port in Baltimore, they had difficulty controlling the cargo transfer from the shipping vessel onto a tractor trailer. The cargo arrived in good condition, but the team’s sensors registered excessive forces during the port handling, which must be addressed for future shipments.
Later this year, the DUNE team will start shipping real APAs. From Daresbury Lab to SURF, the journey should take three to four weeks, including 10 days at sea. Through 2027, they will send 150 APAs to South Dakota in 35 transports.
There will be even more logistical challenges once the detector is built: It will take an enormous amount of planning and coordination to get the vast amounts of liquid argon required for the experiment down into the underground detectors.
But the team is already working on those logistics.
Holzbauer is on a Fermilab panel where he is carefully documenting lessons learned for the benefit of people managing similar projects. He already used his experience with the cryomodule frame to advise Beltramello on the APA transport system.
“I think this is the model going forward for these projects,” says Holzbauer. “We want it to be a more multinational collaboration. We want it to be something where the world can contribute and help us achieve these large facilities together and participate in the science that comes out of it.”
See the full article here .
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five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.
Symmetry is a joint Fermilab/SLAC publication.
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