In an abandoned gold mine close to Deadwood, South Dakota, construction has started on what is arguably the world’s largest science experiment. I’m part of an international team of around 1,000 scientists assembled to design and run this project – the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) – in order to study the most abundant yet elusive matter particle in the universe.
In doing so, we may move a step closer to understanding the origins of matter and to completing science’s model of how the universe works...
Particle physicists like me are fascinated by neutrinos because of their unusual properties, which may be directly linked to phenomena that could explain the structure of the universe. Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles that can’t be broken down into anything else. They are everywhere but are enormously difficult to catch as they have very nearly no mass, are not charged and rarely interact with other particles.
About 100 billion of them travel through our fingertips every second but almost all of them go through the Earth without leaving any trace. Most of these neutrinos originate from nuclear reactions powering the sun. Neutrinos also come from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere, or exploding stars. They were also abundantly produced just after the birth of the universe...
