Overview
- Crews at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, which began lowering steel Thursday, are starting the build of DUNE’s far‑detector structures a mile below Lead, South Dakota.
- DUNE will fire an intense neutrino beam from Fermilab in Illinois to huge argon‑filled detectors 800 miles away to study neutrino behavior and possible matter–antimatter differences.
- Next, teams plan to move CERN‑supplied cryostat materials underground, assemble the first tank over months, and thread thousands of hair‑thin wires that capture neutrino signals.
- Each of the first two detector modules will stand about five stories tall and hold roughly 17,000 tons of liquid argon kept near minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit.
- The project has slipped about five years and grown to nearly $5 billion, and rivals Hyper‑Kamiokande in Japan and JUNO in China could publish some key neutrino results sooner.