DUNE will use liquid-argon time projection chamber technology both near and far
DUNE will use liquid-argon time projection chamber technology both near and far
Publish Date: 2026-05-21 10:00:00
Source Domain: news.fnal.gov
Physicists discovered decades ago that odd little particles called neutrinos, of which there are three known “flavors,” morph between these flavors as they travel, and they call this phenomenon neutrino oscillation. The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, developed by an international collaboration and hosted by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, aims to answer fundamental questions about the early evolution of the universe through its study of these oscillations. This requires a neutrino beam and the ability to sample the neutrinos right out of the gate in their original state and again after they change.
To capture the data, DUNE is building both a near detector and a far detector in the path of the most intense neutrino beam ever created. The hybrid near detector, located only about 2,000 feet downstream from the neutrino source at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, will get the first taste. But most of the neutrinos will travel 800 miles on to the far detector at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota, where only a small proportion will interact with the detector because the beam will spread out over that distance and neutrinos are famously elusive. The rest will harmlessly sail on, largely unimpeded, through the Earth’s crust and beyond.
Since the DUNE far detector will use liquid-argon time projection chamber technology to measure neutrinos, it is critical that the same technology be used for the near detector to facilitate a comparison of data on the same target — liquid argon. This part of DUNE’s near detector is called ND-LAr, short for “near detector liquid argon.”
“Despite being only 1% the size of one far detector module, this ND-LAr detector is still large enough to fully contain the signals from neutrinos.”
Michele Weber, the University of Bern
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