Each morning, two dozen miners and engineers pile right into a cage-like elevator for an 11-minute descent into the bowels of South Dakota’s Black Hills.
On the backside, a mile under the floor, the cage door lifts and the employees descend a rocky, winding hall. At its finish lies the results of three years’ work: two empty caverns, every as tall as a seven-story constructing and so lengthy that it takes a full second on your voice to succeed in the far wall and echo again.
For greater than a century, these depths had been scoured by miners in quest of gold. They now maintain the Sanford Underground Analysis Facility, or SURF. Within the coming years, a number of the world’s high particle physicists plan to show this realm into an 800-mile-long, $5 billion tin telephone listening unit. With it, they hope to listen to a whispered reply to an existential query: How did we get right here?
The message can be carried by incoming neutrinos – unusual, elusive particles that weigh subsequent to nothing and journey virtually as quick as gentle. On the different finish of the telephone, a half-mile-wide particle accelerator operated by the Fermi Nationwide Accelerator Laboratory,​​ simply outdoors Chicago, will create trillions of neutrinos each second in a slim beam aimed straight at this cave. They are going to sail underground, not by a tunnel, however by strong rock on the territory of three states.
Physicists hope that when the neutrinos arrive, they are going to lastly clarify how the Huge Bang created so little extra matter than its reverse, antimatter, the surplus that makes up all the things within the universe right now.
The telephone, formally referred to as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, is the most important scientific and engineering challenge below American soil in historical past. It took a decade to get thus far, and it could take one other decade earlier than it begins its work. If all goes properly, it would flip the squirrel neutrino right into a recognized amount, filling a significant hole in scientists’ understanding of the universe and maybe returning the US to its former place on the heart of particle physics.
