Local Manager: Giuseppe Di Sciascio; PI: Sergio Bertolucci, Laura Patrizii (BO).
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a leading-edge international experiment in neutrino science, designed to address some of the most fundamental questions in particle physics and cosmology. DUNE will utilize the world’s most intense neutrino beam produced at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, and it consist of two detectors: a near detector located at Fermilab and a massive far detector over 1,300 kilometers away, installed more than a kilometer underground at the Sanford Underground Research Laboratory in Lead, South Dakota.
The primary goals of DUNE include determining the neutrino mass ordering and probing CP violation in the lepton sector, phenomena that could help explain the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. In addition, DUNE will search for proton decay, a process predicted by certain extensions of the Standard Model, which, if observed, would represent a breakthrough in particle physics. The experiment also aims to detect neutrinos from core-collapse supernovae in our galaxy, offering a unique opportunity to study the formation of neutron stars and potentially witness the birth of a black hole.
To support these efforts, two prototype far detectors have been developed at CERN. The first began data-taking in September 2018, while the second is currently under construction.