Hundreds of students, faculty and townspeople gathered in the rotunda of Dallas Hall on Monday, Aug. 21 to view a projection of the Great American Solar Eclipse at a viewing hosted by Dedman College and the SMU Physics Department. (Jeff McWhorter/SMU)
Dedman College, SMU Physics Department host Great American Solar Eclipse 2017 viewing
The festive event coincided with the kick-off of SMU’s Fall Semester and included Solar Eclipse Cookies served while viewing the rare astronomical phenomenon.
The eclipse reached its peak at 1:09 p.m. in Dallas at more than 75% of totality.
“What a great first day of the semester and terrific event to bring everyone together with the help of Dedman College scientists,” said Dedman Dean Thomas DiPiero. “And the eclipse cookies weren’t bad, either.”
Physics faculty provided indirect methods for observing the eclipse, including a telescope with a viewing cone on the steps of historic Dallas Hall, a projection of the eclipse onto a screen into Dallas Hall, and a variety of homemade hand-held devices.
Outside on the steps of Dallas Hall, Associate Professor Stephen Sekula manned his home-built viewing tunnel attached to a telescope for people to indirectly view the eclipse.
“I was overwhelmed by the incredible response of the students, faculty and community,” Sekula said. “The people who flocked to Dallas Hall were energized and engaged. It moved me that they were so interested in — and, in some cases, had their perspective on the universe altered by — a partial eclipse of the sun by the moon.”
A team of Physics Department faculty assembled components to use a mirror to project the eclipse from a telescope on the steps of Dallas Hall into the rotunda onto a screen hanging from the second-floor balcony.
Adjunct Professor John Cotton built the mount for the mirror — with a spare, just in case — and Professor and Department Chairman Ryszard Stroynowski and Sekula arranged the tripod setup and tested the equipment.
Stroynowski also projected an illustration of the Earth, the moon and the sun onto the wall of the rotunda to help people visualize movement and location of those cosmic bodies during the solar eclipse.
Professor Fred Olness handed out cardboard projectors and showed people how to use them to indirectly view the eclipse.
“The turn-out was fantastic,” Olness said. “Many families with children participated, and we distributed cardboard with pinholes so they could project the eclipse onto the sidewalk. It was rewarding that they were enthused by the science.”
Stroynowski, Sekula and others at the viewing event were interviewed by CBS 11 TV journalist Robert Flagg.
Physics Professor Thomas Coan and Guillermo Vasquez, SMU Linux and research computing support specialist, put together a sequence of photos they took during the day from Fondren Science Building.
“The experience of bringing faculty, students and even some out-of-campus community members together by sharing goggles, cameras, and now pictures of one of the great natural events, was extremely gratifying,” Vasquez said.
Sekula said the enthusiastic response from the public is driving plans to prepare for the next event of this kind.
“I’m really excited to share with SMU and Dallas in a total eclipse of the sun on April 8, 2024,” he said.
A massive particle detector a mile underground is the key to unlocking the secrets of a beam of neutrinos that will be shot beneath the Earth from Chicago to South Dakota.
Coan is one of about 1,000 scientists around the world collaborating on DUNE — a massive particle detector being built a mile underground in South Dakota to unlock the mysteries of neutrino particles.
The research is funded by the by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science in conjunction with CERN and international partners from 30 countries.
SMU is one of more than 100 institutions from around the world building hardware for the massive international experiment that may change our understanding of the universe. Construction will take years and scientists expect to begin taking data in the middle of the next decade, said Coan.
The Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) will house the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. When complete, LBNF/DUNE will be the largest experiment ever built in the United States to study the properties of the mysterious particles called neutrinos.
By Lance Murray
Dallas Innovates
Construction of a huge particle detector in South Dakota could lead to a change in how we understand the universe, and scientists from the University of Texas at Arlington and Southern Methodist University in Dallas will play roles in helping to unlock the mystery of neutrinos.
Ground was broken a mile underground recently at the Sanford Underground Research Facility at the Homestake Gold Mine in Lead, South Dakota for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) that will house the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).
SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan, and UTA Physics professors Jonathan Asaadi and Jaehoon Yu will be among scientists from more than 100 institutions around the world who will be involved in the experiment.
DUNE will be constructed and operated at the mine site by a group of about 1,000 scientists and engineers from 30 nations.
The Homestake Mine was the location where neutrinos were discovered by Raymond Davis Jr. in 1962. It was the the largest and deepest gold mine in North America until its closure in 2002.
LBNF/DUNE will be the biggest experiment ever built in the U.S. to study the properties of neutrinos, one of the fundamental particles that make up the universe.
“DUNE is designed to investigate a broad swath of the properties of neutrinos, one of the universe’s most abundant but still mysterious electrically neutral particles,” Coan said in the release.
These puzzling particles are similar to electrons, but they have one huge difference — they don’t carry an electrical charge. Neutrinos come in three types: the electron neutrino, the muon, and the tau.
What is the experiment’s goal? Coan said it seeks to understand strange phenomena such as neutrinos changing identities in mid-flight — known as “oscillation” — as well as the behavioral differences between a neutrino and its anti-neutrino sibling.
“A crisp understanding of neutrinos holds promise for understanding why any matter survived annihilation with antimatter from the Big Bang to form the people, planets, and stars we see today,” Coan said in the release. “DUNE is also able to probe whether or not the humble proton, found in all atoms of the universe, is actually unstable and ultimately destined to eventually decay away. It even has sensitivity to understanding how stars explode into supernovae by studying the neutrinos that stream out from them during the explosion.”
Coan also is involved in another massive particle detector in northern Minnesota knows as NOvA, where he is a principal investigator.
Groundbreaking held today in South Dakota marks the start of excavation for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, future home to the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.
SMU is one of more than 100 institutions from around the world building hardware for a massive international experiment — a particle detector — that could change our understanding of the universe.
Construction will take years and scientists expect to begin taking data in the middle of the next decade, said SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan, a professor in the SMU Department of Physics and a researcher on the experiment.
The turning of a shovelful of earth a mile underground marks a new era in particle physics research. The groundbreaking ceremony was held Friday, July 21, 2017 at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota.
Dignitaries, scientists and engineers from around the world marked the start of construction of the experiment that could change our understanding of the universe.
The Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) will house the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Called DUNE for short, it will be built and operated by a group of roughly 1,000 scientists and engineers from 30 countries, including Coan.
When complete, LBNF/DUNE will be the largest experiment ever built in the United States to study the properties of mysterious particles called neutrinos. Unlocking the mysteries of these particles could help explain more about how the universe works and why matter exists at all.
“DUNE is designed to investigate a broad swath of the properties of neutrinos, one of the universe’s most abundant but still mysterious electrically neutral particles,” Coan said.
The experiment seeks to understand strange phenomena like neutrinos changing identities — called “oscillation” — in mid-flight and the behavioral differences between a neutrino an its anti-neutrino sibling, Coan said.
“A crisp understanding of neutrinos holds promise for understanding why any matter survived annihilation with antimatter from the Big Bang to form the people, planets and stars we see today,” Coan said. “DUNE is also able to probe whether or not the humble proton, found in all atoms of the universe, is actually unstable and ultimately destined to eventually decay away. It even has sensitivity to undertanding how stars explode into supernovae by studying the neutrinos that stream out from them during the explosion.”
Coan also is a principal investigator on NOvA, another neutrino experiment collaboration of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Laboratory. NOvA, in northern Minnesota, is another massive particle detector designed to observe and measure the behavior of neutrinos.
Similar to NOvA, DUNE will be a neutrino beam from Fermilab that runs to Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota. DUNE’s beam will be more powerful and will take the measurements NOvA is taking to an unprecedented precision, scientists on both experiments have said. Any questions NOvA fails to answer will most certainly be answered by DUNE.
At its peak, construction of LBNF is expected to create almost 2,000 jobs throughout South Dakota and a similar number of jobs in Illinois.
Institutions in dozens of countries will contribute to the construction of DUNE components. The DUNE experiment will attract students and young scientists from around the world, helping to foster the next generation of leaders in the field and to maintain the highly skilled scientific workforce in the United States and worldwide.
Beam of neutrinos will travel 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) through the Earth
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located outside Chicago, will generate a beam of neutrinos and send them 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) through the Earth to Sanford Lab, where a four-story-high, 70,000-ton detector will be built beneath the surface to catch those neutrinos.
Scientists will study the interactions of neutrinos in the detector, looking to better understand the changes these particles undergo as they travel across the country in less than the blink of an eye.
Ever since their discovery 61 years ago, neutrinos have proven to be one of the most surprising subatomic particles, and the fact that they oscillate between three different states is one of their biggest surprises. That discovery began with a solar neutrino experiment led by physicist Ray Davis in the 1960s, performed in the same underground mine that now will house LBNF/DUNE. Davis shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2002 for his experiment.
DUNE scientists will also look for the differences in behavior between neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos, which could give us clues as to why the visible universe is dominated by matter.
DUNE will also watch for neutrinos produced when a star explodes, which could reveal the formation of neutron stars and black holes, and will investigate whether protons live forever or eventually decay, bringing us closer to fulfilling Einstein’s dream of a grand unified theory.
Construction over the next 10 years is funded by DOE with 30 countries
But first, the facility must be built, and that will happen over the next 10 years. Now that the first shovel of earth has been moved, crews will begin to excavate more than 870,000 tons of rock to create the huge underground caverns for the DUNE detector.
Large DUNE prototype detectors are under construction at European research center CERN, a major partner in the project, and the technology refined for those smaller versions will be tested and scaled up when the massive DUNE detectors are built.
This research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science in conjunction with CERN and international partners from 30 countries.
DUNE collaborators come from institutions in Armenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Greece, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Madagascar, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Romania, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom and the United States. — Fermilab, SMU
Scientists have sorted through millions of cosmic ray strikes and zeroed in on neutrino interactions in their quest to learn more about the abundant yet mysterious particles that flit through ordinary matter as though it isn’t there.
Initial data from a new U.S.–based physics experiment indicates scientists are a step closer to understanding neutrinos, the second most abundant particle in the universe.
Neutrinos are little understood, but indications are they hold clues to why matter overwhelmingly survived after the Big Bang instead of just energy in the form of light.
The first data from NOvA, the experiment in northern Minnesota, indicates that NOvA’s massive particle detector — designed to observe and measure the behavior of neutrinos — is functioning as planned.
“In the 18 or so months the experiment has been up and running we’ve analyzed about 8 percent of the data we anticipate collecting over the life of the experiment,” said physicist Thomas Coan, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
Coan, a professor in SMU’s Department of Physics, is a principal investigator on NOvA, a collaboration of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Laboratory. “So we’re really just at the beginning. But it’s a great start, and it’s gratifying that the beginning has begun so well.”
More than 200 scientists from the U.S. and six other countries make up the collaboration.
Specifically, they predict that the experiment’s data will tell them the relative weight of the three different types or “flavors” of neutrinos, as well as reveal whether neutrinos and antineutrinos interact in the same way.
Answers to those questions will add information to theories of matter’s existence and why it wasn’t annihilated during the Big Bang, Coan said.
The completed NOvA far detector in Ash River, Minnesota, stands 50 feet tall, 50 feet wide and 200 feet long. The pivoting machine that was used to move each block of the detector into place now serves as the capstone on the end of the completed structure. Photo: Fermilab
“If we want to understand the universe on a large scale, we have to understand how neutrinos behave,” he said. “Experimental observations from NOvA will be an important input into the overarching theory.”
Neutrinos flit through ordinary matter almost as if it weren’t there, so it takes a massive detector to capture evidence of their behavior. Coan likens NOvA to a gigantic pixel camera with its honeycomb array of thousands of plastic tubes encasing highly purified mineral oil.
Neutrinos are not observed directly, so scientists only see the tracks of their rare interactions with atoms. An accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois shoots a neutrino beam, observed first by a near detector there, then by a far detector some 500 miles away in Minnesota.
The far detector, or “pixel camera,” is 50 feet tall by 50 feet wide and 200 feet long.
Oscillating neutrinos change from one “type” to another: electron, muon or tau
As the neutrinos travel they change from one type or “flavor” to another. That “oscillation” confirms the NOvA detector is functioning as designed.
A graphic representation of one of the first neutrino interactions captured at the NOvA far detector in northern Minnesota. The dotted red line represents the neutrino beam, generated at Fermilab in Illinois and sent through 500 miles of earth to the far detector. The image on the left is a simplified 3-D view of the detector, the top right view shows the interaction from the top of the detector, and the bottom right view shows the interaction from the side of the detector. Illustration: Fermilab
The results were culled by scientists who sorted through millions of cosmic ray strikes to zero-in on neutrino interactions.
“People are ecstatic to see our first observation of neutrino oscillations,” said NOvA co-spokesperson Peter Shanahan, Fermilab. “For all the people who worked over the course of a decade on the designing, building, commissioning, and operating this experiment, it’s beyond gratifying.”
Researchers have collected data aggressively since February 2014, recording neutrino interactions in the 14,000-ton far detector in Ash River, Minnesota, while construction was still underway. This allowed the collaboration to gather data while testing systems before starting operations with the complete detector in November 2014, shortly after the experiment was completed on time and under budget. NOvA construction and operations are supported by the DOE’s Office of Science.
The neutrino beam generated at Fermilab passes through the underground near detector, which measures the beam’s neutrino composition before it leaves the Fermilab site.
The particles then travel more than 500 miles straight through the earth, changing types along the way. About once per second, Fermilab’s accelerator sends trillions of neutrinos to Minnesota, but the elusive neutrinos interact so rarely that only a few will register at the far detector.
Neutrino-atom interaction releases a signature trail of particles and light
The beam fires neutrinos every 1.5 seconds, but only for 10 microseconds, Coan said. Including downtime for maintenance, neutrinos are produced two minutes total over the course of a year.
“We could make the detector out of iron or granite to get more target atoms and have more interactions, but we’d never be able to observe the interactions in iron and granite,” Coan said. “So the detector has to be transparent somehow, a sort of camera. Those two goals are somewhat contradictory. So it takes some cleverness to figure out how to have a massive detector and still see events in it.”
When a neutrino bumps into an atom in the NOvA detector, it releases a signature trail of particles and light depending on which type it is: an electron, muon or tau neutrino. The beam originating at Fermilab is made almost entirely of one type – muon neutrinos – and scientists can measure how many of those muon neutrinos disappear over their journey and reappear as electron neutrinos.
If oscillations had not occurred, experimenters predicted they would see 201 muon neutrinos arrive at the NOvA far detector in the data collected; instead, they saw a mere 33, proof that the muon neutrinos were disappearing as they transformed into the two other flavors
Similarly, if oscillations had not occurred scientists expected to see only one electron neutrino appearance, due to background interactions, but the collaboration saw six such events, which is evidence that some of the missing muon neutrinos had turned into electron neutrinos.
NOvA observations are nearly equivalent results to those at world’s other neutrino experiments
Similar long-distance experiments such as T2K in Japan and MINOS at Fermilab have seen these muon neutrino-to-electron neutrino oscillations before. NOvA, which will take data for at least six years, is seeing nearly equivalent results in a shorter time frame, something that bodes well for the experiment’s ambitious goal of measuring neutrino properties that have eluded other experiments so far.
“One of the reasons we’ve made such excellent progress is because of the impressive Fermilab neutrino beam and accelerator team,” said NOvA co-spokesperson Mark Messier of Indiana University. “Having a beam of that power running so efficiently gives us a real competitive edge and allows us to gather data quickly.”
Fermilab’s flagship accelerator recently set a high-energy neutrino beam world record when it reached 521 kilowatts, and the laboratory is working on improving the neutrino beam even further for projects such as NOvA and the upcoming Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Researchers expect to reach 700 kilowatts early next calendar year, accumulating a slew of neutrino interactions and tripling the amount of data recorded by year’s end.
Most abundant massive particle in the universe is still poorly understood
Neutrinos are the most abundant massive particle in the universe, but are still poorly understood. While researchers know that neutrinos come in three types, they don’t know which is the heaviest and which is the lightest. Figuring out this ordering — one of the goals of the NOvA experiment — would be a great litmus test for theories about how the neutrino gets its mass.
While the famed Higgs boson helps explain how some particles obtain their masses, scientists don’t know yet how the Higgs is connected to neutrinos, if at all.
The measurement of the neutrino mass hierarchy is also crucial information for neutrino experiments trying to see if the neutrino is its own antiparticle.
Like T2K, NOvA can also run in antineutrino mode, opening a window to see whether neutrinos and antineutrinos are fundamentally different. An asymmetry early in the universe’s history could have tipped the cosmic balance in favor of matter, making the world we see today possible. Soon, scientists will be able to combine the neutrino results obtained by T2K, MINOS and NOvA, yielding more precise answers about scientists’ most pressing neutrino questions.
“The rapid success of the NOvA team demonstrates a commitment and talent for taking on complex projects to answer the biggest questions in particle physics,” said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. “We’re glad that the detectors are functioning beautifully and providing quality data that will expand our understanding of the subatomic realm.”
The NOvA collaboration comprises 210 scientists and engineers from 39 institutions in the United States, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Russia and the United Kingdom. — Fermi National Laboratory, SMU
NOvA stands for NuMI Off-Axis Electron Neutrino Appearance. NuMI is itself an acronym, standing for Neutrinos from the Main Injector, Fermilab’s flagship accelerator. The Fermilab Accelerator Complex is an Office of Science User Facility.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Ill., and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov, and follow Fermilab on Twitter at @Fermilab.
The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
International team of physicists study elusive fundamental particles present at origins of universe, and which still bombard us today.
SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan talked with Fox 4 DFW reporter Dan Godwin about the neutrino, an elusive fundamental particle that scientists are working to understand using one of the most powerful physics experiments in the world.
Godwin hosted Coan on the program Fox4Ward on Nov. 30, 2014. Coan and Godwin discussed neutrinos, one of the most elusive particles in the Standard Model’s “particle zoo.”
Neutrinos are the subject of the NOvA experiment, with the goal to better understand the origins of matter and the inner workings of the universe.
One of the largest and most powerful neutrino experiments in the world, NOvA is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.
At the heart of NOvA are its two particle detectors — gigantic machines of plastic and electronic arrays.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Dr. Thomas E. Coan in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
One detector is at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago and the other is at Ash River, Minn. near the Canadian border.
Critical to crunching data from the experiment is a network of supercomputers, including the SMU ManeFrame, one of the most powerful academic supercomputers in the nation.
Designed and engineered by about a hundred U.S. and international scientists, NOvA is managed by Fermilab. NOvA’s detectors and its particle accelerator officially started up at the end of October 2014.
Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, is a member of the NOvA experiment. He is co-convener of NOvA’s calibration and alignment group, guiding a crew of international scientists who handle responsibility for understanding the response of NOvA’s detector when neutrinos pass through and strike it.
Neutrinos are invisible fundamental particles that are so abundant they constantly bombard us and pass through us at a rate of more than 100,000 billion particles a second. Because they rarely interact with matter, they have eluded scientific observation.
By Dan Godwin
Fox 4Ward Host
When you talk about the origin of the universe, the Big Bang is widely accepted theory. But it never hurts to have additional evidence. And that’s where an SMU super computer comes in. In this FOX 4Ward, Dan Godwin finds out why the smallest particles in the universe are getting lots of scrutiny.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
SMU physicist Thomas Coan talked with KERA about the neutrino, an elusive fundamental particle that scientists are working to understand using one of the most powerful physics experiments in the world.
Neutrinos are the subject of the NOvA experiment, with the goal to better understand the origins of matter and the inner workings of the universe.
One of the largest and most powerful neutrino experiments in the world, NOvA is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.
At the heart of NOvA are its two particle detectors — gigantic machines of plastic and electronic arrays. One detector is at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago and the other is at Ash River, Minn. near the Canadian border.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Dr. Thomas E. Coan in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
Designed and engineered by about a hundred U.S. and international scientists, NOvA is managed by Fermilab. NOvA’s detectors and its particle accelerator officially start up the end of October 2014.
Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, is a member of the NOvA experiment. He is co-convener of NOvA’s calibration and alignment group, guiding a crew of international scientists who handle responsibility for understanding the response of NOvA’s detector when it is struck by neutrinos.
Neutrinos are invisible fundamental particles that are so abundant they constantly bombard us and pass through us at a rate of more than 100,000 billion particles a second. Because they rarely interact with matter, they have eluded scientific observation.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Elusive particle that is one of the building blocks of matter holds the key to space, time, matter, energy and origins of the universe
When scientists pour 3.0 million gallons of mineral oil into what are essentially 350,000 giant plastic tubes, the possibility of a leak can’t be overlooked, says SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan.
The oil and tubes are part of the integral structure of the world’s newest experiment to understand neutrinos — invisible fundamental particles that are so abundant they constantly bombard us and pass through us at a rate of more than 100,000 billion particles a second.
Neutrinos rarely interact with matter and so mostly pass through objects completely unnoticed. The purpose of NOvA, as the new experiment is called, is to better understand neutrinos. That knowledge may lead to a clearer picture of the origins of matter and the inner workings of the universe, Coan said.
”Neutrinos are thought to play a key but still somewhat murky role in explaining how the universe evolved to contain just the matter we see today and somehow disposing of the antimatter present at the Big Bang,” he said.
A massive pivoting machine moves one block of the NOvA far detector across the hall in Ash River, Minn., to connect it with the rest of the detector. Each block measures 50 feet by 50 feet by 6 feet, and was assembled from PVC modules. (Credit: Fermilab)
Coan is an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics and a member of the NOvA experiment. “Solving this riddle is likely to require many experiments to get the story correct,” he said. “NOvA is a next step along what is likely to be a twisty path.”
At the heart of NOvA are its two particle detectors — gigantic machines of plastic and electronic arrays, one at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago and the other in Ash River, Minn. near the Canadian border.
Designed and engineered by about a hundred U.S. and international scientists, NOvA is managed by Fermilab. NOvA’s detectors and its particle accelerator officially start up the end of October.
“There are essentially zero leaks,” Coan said. “This was a bit of a surprise. It guarantees that critical electronics won’t be damaged by leaking oil and that the detector will be highly efficient for detecting the neutrinos we aim at it.”
One of the largest and most powerful neutrino experiments in the world, NOvA is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.
SMU graduate student Biao Wang is 300 feet underground in front of the NOvA close detector. Under the direction of SMU physicist Thomas Coan, Wang works on the maintenance and trouble shooting of the detector as an on-call expert for the cooling system of the read-out electronics.
It has the world’s most powerful beam of neutrinos, is the most powerful accelerator neutrino experiment ever built in the United States, and is the longest distance neutrino experiment in the world.
Coan, a co-convener of NOvA’s calibration and alignment group, guides a crew of international scientists who handle responsibility for understanding the response of NOvA’s detector when it is struck by neutrinos.
“The detector has been behaving extremely well,” Coan said, noting NOvA scientists were delighted by the machine’s successful performance during testing after five years of construction.
Neutrino beam will travel near speed of light
Central to the detector are its rectangular plastic tubes staggered in horizontal and vertical layers. As neutrinos strike the oil-filled plastic tubes, the interaction makes the oil — liquid scintillator — faintly glow and creates various particles.
Special green fiberoptic cables in the plastic tubes transmit the faint glow from the liquid scintillator to photosensors at one end of each tube, where the light is converted to bursts of electricity which in turn are sent to nearby computers.
When a neutrino strikes an atom in the liquid scintillator filling the 15-kiloton far detector, it releases a burst of charged particles. Scientists can detect these particles and use them to learn about neutrino interactions.
“We don’t actually see the neutrinos,” Coan said. “We see the particles that are the after-party — the final state particles produced by the neutrinos after they strike the detector.”
SMU’s supercomputer ManeFrame will have a high-profile role with NOvA. SMU will contribute four million processing hours each year to the experiment, Coan said.
The process begins when NOvA’s underground accelerator near Chicago shoots a beam of neutrinos at nearly the speed of light to the particle detectors. Plans call for the accelerator to run for six years or more, stopping only occasionally for maintenance breaks.
“This is a long process,” Coan said. “That is uncommon in our modern culture where we tend to expect quick results. But it will take time for us to capture enough data to do all the science we want to do. It will take years. In a couple weeks Fermilab will start bringing the beam back — which is a more complicated process than just pushing a few buttons and starting it up.”
Scientists hope to discover the properties of neutrinos
NOvA’s purpose is to capture a significant volume of data to allow scientists to draw conclusions about the properties of neutrinos.
Book a live interview
To book a live or taped interview with Dr. Thomas E. Coan in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
Those properties may hold answers to the nature of matter, energy, space and time, and lead to understanding the origins of the universe.
Specifically, Coan said, NOvA physicists want to know how different types of neutrinos morph from one kind to another, the probability for that to occur, the relative weight of neutrinos, and the difference in behavior between neutrinos and anti-neutrinos.
NOvA’s particle detectors were both constructed within the neutrino beam sent from Fermilab in Batavia, Ill. to northern Minnesota. The 300-ton near detector observes the neutrinos as they embark on their journey through the earth, with no tunnel needed. The 14,000-ton far detector spots those neutrinos after their 500-mile trip, and allows scientists to analyze how they change over that long distance.
Construction on NOvA’s two massive neutrino detectors began in 2009. The Department of Energy in September said construction of the experiment was completed on schedule and under budget.
Scientists predict detectors will catch only a few neutrinos a day
For the next six years, Fermilab will send tens-of thousands of billions of neutrinos every second in a beam aimed at both detectors, and scientists expect to catch only a few each day in the far detector.
From this data, scientists hope to learn more about how and why neutrinos change between one type and another. The three types, called flavors, are the muon, electron and tau neutrino. Over longer distances, neutrinos can flip between these flavors.
NOvA is specifically designed to study muon neutrinos changing into electron neutrinos. Unraveling this mystery may help scientists understand why the universe is composed of matter, and why that matter was not annihilated by antimatter after the Big Bang.
Scientists also will probe the still-unknown masses of the three types of neutrinos in an attempt to determine which is the heaviest.
“Neutrino research is an important part of the worldwide particle physics program,” said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer.
First results expected in 2015
The far detector in Minnesota is believed to be the largest free-standing plastic structure in the world, at 200 feet long, 50 feet high and 50 feet wide. Both detectors are constructed from PVC, and filled with the scintillating liquid that gives off light. The data acquisition system creates 3-D pictures of the interactions for scientists to analyze.
The NOvA far detector in Ash River saw its first long-distance neutrinos in November 2013.
“Building the NOvA detectors was a wide-ranging effort that involved hundreds of people in several countries,” said Gary Feldman, co-spokesperson of the NOvA experiment.
The NOvA collaboration comprises 208 scientists from 38 institutions in the United States, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Russia and the United Kingdom.
NOvA stands for NuMI Off-Axis Electron Neutrino Appearance. NuMI is itself an acronym, standing for Neutrinos from the Main Injector, Fermilab’s flagship accelerator. — Margaret Allen, SMU; Fermilab
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
The enormous capacity of SMU’s new supercomputer ranks it among the largest academic supercomputers in the nation.
ManeFrame, previously known as MANA, was relocated to Dallas from its former location in Maui, Hawaii. (Courtesy of mauinow.com)
SMU now has a powerful new tool for research – one of the fastest academic supercomputers in the nation – and a new facility to house it.
With a cluster of more than 1,000 Dell servers, the system’s capacity is on par with high-performance computing (HPC) power at much larger universities and at government-owned laboratories. The U.S. Department of Defense awarded the system to SMU in August 2013.
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SMU’s Office of Information Technology added the system to the University’s existing – but much smaller – supercomputer. The system is housed in a new facility built at the corner of Mockingbird and Central Expressway. In a contest sponsored by Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Paul W. Ludden, faculty and students chose the name “ManeFrame” to honor the Mustang mascot.
The enormous capacity and speed of HPC expands scientific access to new knowledge around key questions about the universe, disease, human behavior, health, food, water, environment, climate, democracy, poverty, war and peace.
“World-changing discoveries rely on vast computing resources,” says President R. Gerald Turner. “ManeFrame quintuples the University’s supercomputing capacity. Our scientists and students will keep pace with the increasing demand for the ever-expanding computing power that is required to participate in global scientific collaborations. This accelerates our research capabilities exponentially.”
ManeFrame potential
With nearly 11,000 central processing unit cores, ManeFrame boasts 40 terabytes (one terabyte equals a trillion bytes) of memory and more than 1.5 petabytes of storage (a petabyte equals a quadrillion bytes), says Joe Gargiulo, SMU’s chief information officer, who led the installation team.
The sciences and engineering primarily use supercomputers, but that is expanding to include the humanities and the arts. So far, SMU’s heavy users are researchers in physics, math, biology, chemistry and economics.
“This technologically advanced machine will have an impact on shaping our world,” says Thomas M. Hagstrom, chair of the Department of Mathematics in Dedman College and director of SMU’s Center for Scientific Computing. “This makes research that solves problems on a large scale much more accessible. ManeFrame’s theoretical peak would be on the order of 120 Teraflops, which is 120 trillion mathematical operations a second.”
Supercomputers can use sophisticated software and step-by-step procedures for calculations, called algorithms, to solve complex problems that can’t be managed in a researcher’s lab, Hagstrom explains.
“We can’t put the Earth’s climate system or study the evolution of the universe in a physical lab,” he says. “You can only study these and other systems in a comprehensive way using high-performance computing.”
Making SMU competitive
Supercomputing gave University physicists a role in the Higgs Boson research at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. Joining the collaboration with thousands of scientists around the world, SMU’s team was led by Physics Professor Ryszard Stroynowski. SMU’s physicists tapped the existing HPC on campus to quickly analyze massive amounts of data and deliver results to their international colleagues.
SMU’s team will use ManeFrame to keep pace with an even larger flood of data expected from the Large Hadron Collider.
“ManeFrame makes SMU – which is small by comparison with many of its peer institutions at CERN – nimble and competitive, and that lets us be visible in a big experiment like CERN,” says Stephen Sekula, assistant professor of physics. “So we have to have ideas, motivation and creativity – but having a technical resource like ManeFrame lets us act on those things.”
SMU physicist Pavel Nadolsky has conducted “big data” analyses of subatomic particles on the supercomputer as part of an international physics collaboration. Big data refers to probability distributions that depend on many variables. As users ranging from retailers to the health industry collect multitudes of transactional data every day, requirements for big data analysis are rapidly emerging.
“To keep up in our field, we need resources like ManeFrame,” says Nadolsky, associate professor of physics.
“The world is moving into big-data analysis, whether it’s Google, Facebook or the National Security Administration,” Nadolsky says. “We learn a lot about the world by studying multidimensional distributions: It tells about the origins of the universe; it can win elections by using data mining to analyze voting probabilities over time in specific geographical areas and targeting campaign efforts accordingly; and it can predict what people are doing. To make students competitive they must be trained to use these tools efficiently and ethically.”
ManeFrame will have a high-profile role in the U.S. Department of Energy experiment called NOvA, which studies neutrinos, a little-understood and elusive fundamental particle that may help explain why matter, and not just light, exists in the universe today. SMU will contribute four million processing hours each year to the experiment, says Thomas E. Coan, associate professor of physics and a member of the international team.
“We’re in good company with others providing computing, including California Institute of Technology and Harvard,” Coan says. “It’s one way for SMU to play a prominent role in the experiment. We get a lot of visibility among all the institutions participating in NOvA, which are spread out across five countries.”
Advancing discovery One of the heaviest users of SMU’s HPC is John Wise, associate professor of biological sciences, who models a key human protein to improve chemotherapy to kill cancer cells. Wise works with the SMU Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery in Dedman College, an interdisciplinary research initiative of the Biology and Chemistry departments and led by Professor of Biological Sciences Pia Vogel.
Within the Mathematics Department, Assistant Professor Daniel R. Reynolds and his team use high-performance computing to run simulations with applications in cosmology and fusion reactors.
Looking to the future, high-performance computing will be increasing in research, business and the arts, according to James Quick, associate vice president for research and dean of graduate studies.
“High-performance computing has emerged as a revolutionary tool that dramatically increases the rates of scientific discovery and product development, enables wise investment decisions and opens new dimensions in artistic creativity,” says Quick, professor of earth sciences. “SMU will use the computational power of ManeFrame to expand research and creativity and develop educational opportunities for students interested in the application of high-performance computing in their fields – be it science, engineering, business or the arts.” – Margaret Allen
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Thomas Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, works with more than 200 scientists around the world to study one of the universe’s most elusive particles — the neutrino. (Photo: Ellen Smith, The Daily Campus)
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To book a live or taped interview with Dr. Thomas E. Coan in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.
Journalist Lauren Aguirre of the SMU Daily Campus covered the research of SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics.
Coan collaborates with more than 200 scientists around the world to study one of the universe’s most elusive particles — the neutrino.
Neutrinos could yield crucial information about the early moments of the universe, according to Coan and other scientists on the NOvA experiment, which will gather data from a detector in Minnesota.
“Neutrinos are fascinating. They are, besides light, the most numerous particle in the universe yet are notoriously difficult to study since they interact with the rest of matter so feebly,” he said. “Produced in many venues, from laboratories to stars and even bones, they may be their own anti-particles and perhaps play a key role in explaining why any matter at all exists today and survived annihilation with its sister anti-matter produced all the way back in the Big Bang, many billions of years ago.”
The NUMI Off-Axis electron neutrino Appearance, or NOvA, is the world’s longest-distance neutrino experiment. It consists of two huge particle detectors placed 500 miles apart, and its job is to explore the properties of an intense beam of neutrinos.
By Lauren Aguirre
The Daily Campus
Thomas Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, is working with over 200 scientists from around the world to study one of the universe’s most elusive particles — the neutrino.
Neutrinos are one of the most abundant particles in the universe, but are hard to detect because they rarely interact with other particles. The NuMI Off-Axis electron neutrino Appearance, or NOvA, experiment may explain the makeup of the universe.
“Neutrinos play a key role in explaining why anti-matter still exists,” Coan said.
Anti-matter are particles that have the same mass as ordinary matter people are familiar with, but anti-matter has opposite charges. When matter and anti-matter collide, they annihilate each other. According to the NOvA experiment website, studying neutrinos can help explain why the universe has more matter than anti-matter. Because humans are made of regular matter, understanding the balance between these two particles can explain why humans exist.
“By understanding these fundamental questions, we can get down to the fundamental levels of how the universe works,” said Brian Rebel, a staff scientist at Fermilab, the organization that is managing NOvA.
Coan started working at SMU in 1994 and joined the NOvA collaboration in 2005.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Ghostly particles that constantly bombard us can offer clues to the early moments of our universe
Scientists hunting one of nature’s most elusive, yet abundant, elementary particles announced today they’ve succeeded in their first efforts to glimpse neutrinos using a detector in Minnesota.
Neutrinos are generated in nature through the decay of radioactive elements and from high-energy collisions between fundamental particles, such as in the Big Bang that ignited the universe.
Light and ghostly, however, they are unaffected by magnetic fields and travel at the speed of light.
The neutrinos that currently bombard the earth from space are mostly produced by the nuclear reactions that power our sun.
More than 200 physicists from around the world collaborate on the massive neutrino experiment called NOvA, which has taken a decade to design and build.
Their goal is to discover more details about neutrinos, which were theorized in 1930 and first observed in 1956.
The NOvA detector viewed from Google earth. Click to enlarge.
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“These first few neutrino events are a confirmation that NOvA’s basic detector design and construction that dozens of people have worked on for a good fraction of a decade are sound,” said Thomas E. Coan, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, who is a researcher in the NOvA collaboration.
Studying neutrinos could yield crucial information about the early moments of the universe, Coan said.
“Neutrinos are fascinating. They are, besides light, the most numerous particle in the universe yet are notoriously difficult to study since they interact with the rest of matter so feebly,” he said. “Produced in many venues, from laboratories to stars and even bones, they may be their own anti-particles and perhaps play a key role in explaining why any matter at all exists today and survived annihilation with its sister anti-matter produced all the way back in the Big Bang, many billions of years ago.”
NOvA is the world’s longest-distance neutrino experiment The NUMI Off-Axis electron neutrino Appearance, or NOvA, is the world’s longest-distance neutrino experiment. It consists of two huge particle detectors placed 500 miles apart, and its job is to explore the properties of an intense beam of neutrinos.
“NOvA represents a new generation of neutrino experiments,” said Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer. “We are proud to reach this important milestone on our way to learning more about these fundamental particles.”
Scientists generate a beam of the particles for the NOvA experiment using one of the world’s largest accelerators, located at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. They aim this beam in the direction of the two particle detectors, one near the source at Fermilab and the other in Ash River, Minn., near the Canadian border. The detector in Ash River is operated by the University of Minnesota under a cooperative agreement with the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
Billions of those particles are sent through the earth every two seconds, aimed at the massive detectors. Once the experiment is fully operational, scientists will catch a precious few each day.
“It is both intellectually and emotionally satisfying,” said SMU’s Coan, “akin to a great adventure, to be detecting neutrinos in Northern Minnesota that are produced some 500 miles to the south at Fermi National Laboratory near Chicago, after making thousands of engineering and scientific decisions that had to be spot-on to see these events.”
Scientists will use NOvA to understand three changing flavors of neutrinos Neutrinos are curious particles. They come in three types, called flavors, and change between them as they travel. The two detectors of the NOvA experiment are placed so far apart to give the neutrinos the time to oscillate from one flavor to another while traveling at nearly the speed of light. Even though only a fraction of the experiment’s larger detector, called the far detector, is fully built, filled with scintillator and wired with electronics at this point, the experiment has already used it to record signals from its first neutrinos.
“That the first neutrinos have been detected even before the NOvA far detector installation is complete is a real tribute to everyone involved,” said University of Minnesota physicist Marvin Marshak, Ash River Laboratory director. “This early result suggests that the NOvA collaboration will make important contributions to our knowledge of these particles in the not so distant future.”
Once completed, NOvA’s near and far detectors will weigh 300 and 14,000 tons, respectively. Crews will put into place the last module of the far detector early this spring and will finish outfitting both detectors with electronics in the summer.
The NOvA collaboration is made up of 208 scientists from 38 institutions in the United States, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Russia and the United Kingdom. The experiment receives funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and other funding agencies.
The NOvA experiment is scheduled to run for six years. Because neutrinos interact with matter so rarely, scientists expect to catch just about 5,000 neutrinos or antineutrinos during that time. Scientists can study the timing, direction and energy of the particles that interact in their detectors to determine whether they came from Fermilab or elsewhere.
“Seeing neutrinos in the first modules of the detector in Minnesota is a major milestone” Fermilab creates a beam of neutrinos by smashing protons into a graphite target, which releases a variety of particles. Scientists use magnets to steer the charged particles that emerge from the energy of the collision into a beam. Some of those particles decay into neutrinos, and the scientists filter the non-neutrinos from the beam.
Fermilab started sending a beam of neutrinos through the detectors in September, after 16 months of work by about 300 people to upgrade the lab’s accelerator complex.
Different types of neutrinos have different masses, but scientists do not know how these masses compare to one another. A goal of the NOvA experiment is to determine the order of the neutrino masses, known as the mass hierarchy, which will help scientists narrow their list of possible theories about how neutrinos work.
“Seeing neutrinos in the first modules of the detector in Minnesota is a major milestone,” said Fermilab physicist Rick Tesarek, deputy project leader for NOvA. “Now we can start doing physics.” — Andre Salles, Fermilab, and Margaret Allen, SMU
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
The NOvA detector, currently under construction in Ash River, Minn., stands about 50 feet tall and 50 feet wide. The completed detector will weigh 14,000 tons. (Credit: Fermilab)
What will soon be the most powerful neutrino detector in the United States has recorded its first three-dimensional images of particles.
Using the first completed section of the NOvA neutrino detector under construction in Minnesota, scientists have begun collecting data from cosmic rays—particles produced by a constant rain of atomic nuclei falling on the Earth’s atmosphere from space.
Scientists’ goal for the completed detector is to use it to discover properties of mysterious fundamental particles called neutrinos.
Neutrinos are as abundant as cosmic rays in the atmosphere, but they have barely any mass and interact much more rarely with other matter. Many of the neutrinos around today are thought to have originated in the Big Bang when the universe began.
“These recent tests with the very first portions of our eventual 14,000-ton detector are extremely gratifying since they give us confidence that after many years of work by many people, and innumerable design meetings, our detector is actually becoming alive,” said physicist Thomas E. Coan, an associate professor of physics at Southern Methodist University. “There now seem to be no fundamental show stoppers lurking around.”
SMU hosted in January the most recent general meeting for the experiment known by the acronym NOvA.
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“That was the last meeting before these tests were completed and it allowed us to settle details of the tests and make sure they would be crisp and meaningful,” Coan said. “Overall, understanding neutrinos is essential to understanding our universe at a deep level. But studying them is also considerable fun since they are so weird.”
The active section of the detector, under construction in Ash River, Minn., is about 12 feet long, 15 feet wide and 20 feet tall. The full detector will measure more than 200 feet long, 50 feet wide and 50 feet tall.
“It’s taken years of hard work and close collaboration among universities, national laboratories and private companies to get to this point,” said Pier Oddone, director of the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Fermilab manages the project to construct the detector.
“The more we know about neutrinos, the more we know about the early universe and about how our world works at its most basic level,” said NOvA co-spokesperson Gary Feldman of Harvard University.
“A possible path to understanding why any matter at all is present in our universe — including the matter that comprises us — is to understand the behavior of neutrinos, which are especially mysterious subatomic particles,” said SMU’s Coan.
“Neutrinos are almost a billion times more numerous in the universe than hydrogen, the universe’s most abundant element. But with a mass more than a million times smaller than an electron’s, the electrically neutral neutrino interacts extraordinarily feebly with matter,” he said. “A common reference scale is that a neutrino needs to travel a distance of a light year through lead before it will interact with another particle. Neutrinos also have the peculiar property that they morph from one type — or “flavor” — to another as they travel.”
Later this year, Fermilab, outside of Chicago, will start sending a beam of neutrinos 500 miles through the earth to the NOvA detector near the Canadian border. When a neutrino interacts in the NOvA detector, the particles it produces leave trails of light in their wake. The detector records these streams of light, enabling physicists to identify the original neutrino and measure the amount of energy it had.
“The morphing of a muon flavor neutrino to an electron flavor neutrino is particularly interesting,” Coan said, noting that the flavor of a neutrino is determined by what electrically charged particles it produces when it eventually interacts with matter. “An electron neutrino produces electrons while a muon neutrino produces a muon, which is a kind of heavy, radioactive electron.”
The whole phenomenon of neutrino morphing — called “neutrino flavor oscillation” — is poorly understood, he said, but needs to be if neutrino interactions in the early universe can be sensibly thought to be central to explaining the subsequent absence of antimatter.
“NOνA will produce large numbers of muon neutrinos in the particle beam. The far detector contains enough target nuclei for the neutrinos to interact with,” Coan said. “The far distance between source and detector allows time for the muon neutrinos to morph into electron neutrinos. NOνA will detect the morphing of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos by detecting the creation of electrons in the far detector. Measuring the frequency of this particular morphing is one important science goal.”
When cosmic rays pass through the NOvA detector, they leave straight tracks and deposit well-known amounts of energy. They are great for calibration, said Mat Muether, a Fermilab post-doctoral researcher who has been working on the detector.
“Everybody loves cosmic rays for this reason,” Muether said. “They are simple and abundant and a perfect tool for tuning up a new detector.”
The detector at its current size catches more than 1,000 cosmic rays per second. Naturally occurring neutrinos from cosmic rays, supernovae and the sun stream through the detector at the same time. But the flood of more visible cosmic ray data makes it difficult to pick them out.
Once the upgraded Fermilab neutrino beam starts later this year, the NOvA detector will take data every 1.3 seconds to synchronize with the Fermilab accelerator. Inside this short time window, the burst of neutrinos from Fermilab will be much easier to spot.
The NOvA detector will be operated by the University of Minnesota under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The NOvA experiment is a collaboration of 180 scientists, technicians and students from 20 universities and laboratories in the U.S and another 14 institutions around the world. The scientists are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and funding agencies in the Czech Republic, Greece, India, Russia and the United Kingdom.
SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.
SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.
Physicists may see data as soon as late summer from the prototype for a $278 million science experiment in northern Minnesota that is being designed to find clues to some fundamental mysteries of the universe, including dark matter.
But it could take years before the nation’s largest “neutrino” detector answers the profound questions that matter to scientists.
Construction is underway now on a 220-ton detector that is the “integration prototype” for a much larger 14,000-ton detector. Both are part of NOvA, a cooperative project of the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago and the University of Minnesota‘s school of physics and astronomy. The project may ultimately aid understanding of matter and dark matter, how the universe formed and evolved, and current astrophysical events.
A 65-foot by 370-foot hole in the ground outlines the future NOvA detector in Minnesota. Photo: Fermilab
DOE gave “full construction start” approval Oct. 29, 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. There are 180 scientists and engineers from 28 institutions around the world collaborating on NOvA.
About 40 scientists from the international collaboration will meet Jan. 8-10 at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The meeting is the first for the collaboration since DOE’s approval, said John Cooper, NOvA project manager at Fermilab.
Collaboration scientists will hear technical presentations from one another during the three-day SMU meeting, which will refine NOvA’s design, including the technical details of software, hardware and calibration, said Thomas Coan, associate professor in SMU’s Department of Physics and a scientist on the collaboration team.
The integration prototype, known as the Near Detector because it’s at Fermilab, and the larger detector, known as the Far Detector because it’s farther from Fermilab — are essentially hundreds of thousands of plastic tubes enclosing a massive amount of highly purified mineral oil. The purpose is to detect the highly significant fundamental subatomic particle called the “neutrino” and better understand its nature. NOvA, when construction is completed, will be the largest neutrino experiment in the United States.
NOvA detectors showing planes of alternating vertical and horizontal PVC modules. Photo: Fermilab
“The ‘detector prototype’ has two purposes,” said Cooper. “First it serves as an ‘integration prototype’ forcing us to find all the problems on a real device, and second it will become the ‘Near Detector’ at Fermilab.”
The integration prototype will operate on the surface at Fermilab for about a year starting in late summer 2010, Cooper said. Then in 2012 it will move 300 feet underground to become the Near Detector, he said. Construction on the Far Detector project began in June near Ash River, Minn. The detector should be fully operational by September 2013, according to Fermilab.
A hard-to-observe fundamental particle that travels alone, the neutrino has little or no mass, so rarely interacts with other particles.
Neutrinos are ubiquitous throughout our universe. They were produced during the Big Bang, and many of those are still around. New ones are constantly being created too, through natural occurrences like solar fusion in the sun’s core, or radioactive elements decaying in the Earth’s mantle, as well as when the particle accelerator at Fermilab purposely smashes protons into carbon foils.
Our sun produces so many that hundreds of billions are zinging through our bodies every second at the speed of light, Coan said. It’s hoped the new detector can resolve questions surrounding the three different kinds of neutrinos — electron, tau and muon — and their “oscillation” from one type to another as they travel, he said.
Scientists at the new detectors will analyze data from Fermilab’s neutrino beam to observe evidence of neutrinos when the speedy, lightweight particles occasionally smash into the carbon nuclei in the scintillating oil of the detector, causing a burst of light flashes, Coan said.
NOvA is looking for the most elusive oscillation of the muon type of neutrino to the electron type, Cooper said. — Margaret Allen
Through their research, SMU professors not only bring new information and insights to their classrooms, but also serve as role models and collaborators to students who conduct research in their laboratories across campus.
Maintaining a strong research program is significant for a number of reasons, says James Quick, associate vice president for research and dean of graduate studies.
“Research programs serve as a recruiting tool that helps a university attract the best students,” Quick says. “Research also increases the diversity of ideas on campus and creates opportunities for different departments to work together on interdisciplinary projects.”
In support of SMU’s commitment to research at both faculty and student levels, which is part of the University’s long-term strategic plan, Quick is seeking to more than triple SMU’s annual research spending to $50 million.
He emphasizes that the top 50 universities in the country, as ranked by “U.S. News & World Report,” each conduct more than $50 million a year in research.
“The great universities of the 21st century will spend significant amounts of funds on research,” Quick says. From anthropology to engineering to religious studies, SMU undergraduate and graduate students and their faculty mentors are discovering new knowledge and playing an important role in higher education through their contributions to research.
Lessons From Bolivia
In summer 2007, SMU Seniors Erin Eidenshink and Katie Josephson spent eight weeks in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third-largest city, researching gender roles and how they affect economic development programs in that country. Eidenshink and Josephson received financial support from the Richter International Fellowship Program, which funds independent research abroad for students in SMU’s Honors Program.
Jill DeTemple, assistant professor of religious studies in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, served as their adviser on the research. DeTemple, whose own research examines the effects of faith-based development programs on religious identity in rural Ecuador, spent a semester helping the two students develop a research proposal. She later remained in contact with them by e-mail while they were in Bolivia.
“I am immensely proud of what they accomplished,” DeTemple says. “They applied knowledge that they learned in the classroom and developed research skills. They have made the transition from being consumers of knowledge to being creators of knowledge.”
Now a book chapter written by the students and DeTemple, describing the messages that faith-based organizations communicate about gender roles, has been accepted into an anthology under review for publication.
“Their work highlights the ways in which most development organizations and scholars presume that men and women relate to households and family life,” DeTemple says.
“While we have noted that the evangelical movement in Latin America has brought men in closer relationship to household life, Katie and Erin point out that this has not necessarily freed women to become more active in the public sector, nor has it led to gender parity in the household,” she says. “I learned a lot from their research, and will look at gender roles a little bit differently when I do my research.”
DeTemple says she also has enjoyed interesting conversations with Eidenshink and Josephson.
“Because no one else on campus is doing research in my area, I don’t have these kinds of conversations unless I go to a professional conference,” DeTemple says. “They’re working in the field now. We talk as researcher to researcher.”
Eidenshink says that working with DeTemple and conducting the research “empowered me to draw my own conclusions.”
In addition, DeTemple “challenged us to look at the research that already had been done and then to analyze it based on what we had seen,” says Josephson, a President’s Scholar. “We found that the facts were complex, not simple and straightforward,” she says.
From cheerleader to colleague
Christiana Rissing, a Ph.D. student in SMU’s Chemistry Department, studies the interaction of dendrimers based on a tetravinylsilane core with metals like copper, platinum and silver. Any interesting properties that develop “could prove useful for medical and electronic applications,” she explains.
If she has any questions, Rissing can call on Associate Professor of Chemistry David Son, her adviser. She began studying with Son as an undergraduate and stayed at SMU to pursue her Ph.D. because she enjoys working with him. David Son advises Christiana Rissing.
“In the lab, we’re always teasing Son about his favorite line: ‘It looks promising,'” Rissing says. “He always looks for and finds the silver lining. I can work on a stubborn experiment for weeks, and I start questioning my technique. Even when the results look bad, he will look at all the data and find something that ‘looks promising.’ It makes me want to go that extra step, read that extra paper or search through the literature in case I’ve missed something.”
As a Ph.D. student, Rissing works independently, Son says.
“I treat her more like a colleague now. But, in the beginning, with any student, you have to be a cheerleader,” he says. “When I was a graduate student, more than half of my reactions didn’t work. A big part of my role is to be an encourager.”
The research opportunity
Junior Amy Hand is writing a computer program to design a solenoid magnet that students will use in the physics lab to study the properties of “muons,” electron-like radioactive particles produced in Earth’s upper atmosphere. A solenoid magnet is made by wrapping copper wire in a pattern around a specially shaped mechanical frame to produce a uniform magnetic field within the frame’s interior.
Hand, a President’s Scholar, chose to study at SMU because of research opportunities made available to undergraduates, she says.
“Working with a professor who has so much more experience and can guide me through a project is a huge benefit,” Hand says.
Amy Hand learns the ropes in the physics lab
from Tom Coan.
Tom Coan, associate professor of physics and Hand’s adviser, helps students to develop a broad set of skills, from learning how to solder to selecting and purchasing mechanical and electrical components.
“There are a lot of practical things and a bewildering assortment of things that students have to learn to be efficient in a lab,” Coan says.
Hand researches, tests and refines the various components of her project, working closely with Coan to devise solutions as issues arise.
“The best way to learn the nitty-gritty details is elbow to elbow with a mentor,” Coan says. “It’s like an apprenticeship. You have to invest a fair amount of your time working with a student before you see any return, but the work can be beneficial to both of us.”
Planting The Seed Of Research Sophomore Jason Stegall spent last summer in the Laser Micromachining Laboratory of the Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering using a laser process called micromachining to cut tiny channels on material that can be used to make artificial bones.
“I was testing to see how strong the laser needed to be and how many pulses were required per task,” Stegall says.
Jason Stegall (center) in the lab with David
Willis (left) and Paul Krueger.
A National Science Foundation grant awarded to David Willis and Paul Krueger, associate professors of mechanical engineering, supported Stegall’s research. The three-year grant funds summer research opportunities for nine undergraduate students through 2009.
Through such grants the federal government is trying to encourage more students to conduct research and go to graduate school in engineering and the sciences, Willis says.
“Part of the reason more students don’t go to graduate school is that they don’t know what researchers do, and don’t understand all the opportunities that are available to researchers,” he says.
Stegall says he eventually wants to become a college professor and do research and development for the automotive or aerospace industries.
Torrey Rick’s research involves excavating sites as old as 10,000 years on the Channel Islands off the California coast.
“The work I do is extremely collaborative,” says Rick, assistant professor of anthropology. “Students are an important part of this work, helping to complete field and laboratory analysis and often providing fresh ideas and perspectives. Conducting research also benefits students by showing them how to navigate the world of scholarly publication. Ultimately, doing research and publishing papers can help them secure an academic position.” – Joy Hart
Torrey Rick (center) and Ph.D. students Amanda Aland
and Christopher Wolff.
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In addition, DeTemple “challenged us to look at the research that already had been done and then to analyze it based on what we had seen,” says Josephson, a President’s Scholar. “We found that the facts were complex, not simple and straightforward,” she says.
Sophomore Jason Stegall spent last summer in the 