Excavation starts for U.S. particle physicists’ next giant experiment
By Adrian ChoJul. 21, 2017 , 4:30 PM
Today, physicists and politicians gathered at a former mine in South Dakota to break ground for the United States’s next great particle physics experiment. Known as the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF), the experiment will fire a beam of elusive particles called neutrinos from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, to a gargantuan particle detector 1300 kilometers away in an abandoned gold mine in Lead, South Dakota.
To build the modular detector, workers have to carve out massive caverns 1480 meters underground, haul out stone that weighs as much as a dozen aircraft carries, and truck in millions of liters of frigid liquid argon. This afternoon officials gathered deep underground to turn the first few shovels of stone.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/excavation-starts-us-particle-physicists-next-giant-experiment
