UK engineers build critical link for global flagship neutrino experiment

The Long Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) at Fermilab near Chicago in the US will direct an intense pulsed beam of neutrinos to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) at South Dakota’s Sanford Laboratory.

Results from the experiment may indicate why the Universe is made of matter, detect a supernovae in our galaxy and could observe proton decay.

The UK team  - which is based at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)’s Technology Department at Oxfordshire’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) is producing the so-called target for the system, a device that will be able to convert the most intense pulsed proton beam in the world into a beam of neutrinos.

This device works rather like a crash pad for powerful proton beams: when protons strike the target a particle shower is produced and some of the newly born particles decay or transform into neutrinos, whose rare interactions with matter are then captured and analysed.