A recent article in the New York Times, “Mining for Neutrinos, and for Cosmic Answers” explains the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, South Dakota.
Karsten Heeger, Eugene Higgins Professor and Chair of Physics and Director of Yale’s Wright Lab, is quoted in the article in his capacity as deputy chair of the nation’s 2023 Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5), which set a 10+ year vision for United States particle physics.
One of the recommended scientific priorities mentioned in the P5 report is the completion of the DUNE experiment. In the article, Heeger said that the DUNE project “is a real opportunity for the U.S. to lead the world and to become the center of neutrino physics for the coming decades”.
Heeger is also involved in DUNE research and instrumentation development. He leads a team of researchers and technical staff from Yale’s Wright Laboratory (Wright Lab)—in collaboration with researchers from the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and other DUNE collaborators—to assemble Charge Readout Planes (CRPs) for DUNE at Wright Lab.
The DUNE CRPs are the basic readout components of the detector modules; the mechanism that translates the data obtained by the DUNE experiment into machine-readable output. They are a crucial component of the detector technology of DUNE, to enable it to study the interactions of neutrinos.