Construction on the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is set to begin on Monday inside the former Homestake gold mine near Lead, South Dakota. Engineers will excavate caverns a mile beneath the Black Hills to house four gigantic detectors that will observe neutrinos arriving from the Sun, distant supernovae, and an 800‑mile beam sent from Fermilab near Chicago.
From Gold Mining to Particle Physics
The Homestake shaft has a storied past in neutrino research. In the 1960s, physicist Ray Davis lowered a 100,000‑gallon tank of dry‑cleaning fluid into the mine and recorded the first solar neutrinos by detecting argon atoms produced when neutrinos interacted with chlorine. After the mine closed in 2001, it was repurposed as the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), now home to experiments such as Lux‑Zeplin, which recently reported a possible dark‑matter signal. “We’ve gone from mining the Earth to helping scientists explore the universe,” said Robin Lucero, Lead’s city administrator.
The Scale of DUNE
DUNE’s detectors dwarf earlier setups. Each will stand up to five storeys high, incorporate more than 4,000 tonnes of steel, and together hold 70,000 tonnes of liquid argon chilled to –200 °C. Assembly is expected to take nearly three years, with an additional year required to fill the tanks. “This is a heavy‑duty engineering operation,” noted Prof. David Newbold of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, adding that the project is “like building a ship underground.” The United Kingdom is the largest international partner, supplying core detector components, computing systems for event reconstruction, and the graphite target that will generate the neutrino beam at Fermilab.
Science Goals
Once operational, DUNE will study the intense Fermilab beam as it traverses 800 miles of Earth’s crust and mantle. Most neutrinos will pass straight through the argon, but occasional interactions will produce flashes of light and electrical pulses that reveal the particles’ properties. Researchers aim to determine the ordering of neutrino masses, explore possible new forces, and test why the universe consists primarily of matter rather than antimatter. The experiment will also monitor neutrinos arriving from cosmic sources, offering fresh data on stellar explosions and black‑hole formation.
“Neutrinos do not make sense yet and they could open a door to new physics,” said Dr. Kate Shaw, an experimental particle physicist from the University of Sussex working on DUNE. Earlier this month, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Belgian researcher Francis Halzen for detecting high‑energy neutrinos from Antarctica, underscoring the growing importance of neutrino astronomy. “This really is going to be a golden era,” Newbold added, referencing both the historic mine and the scientific opportunities ahead.
As the massive underground detectors take shape, the town of Lead anticipates new jobs, educational prospects, and a renewed identity rooted in cutting‑edge science rather than gold extraction.
Helene Elliott is the Lead Science & Space Reporter at News Raise. She reports on aerospace missions, astrophysics discoveries, quantum research, and environmental technology.
