Lancaster University has been awarded over £1.8M for two projects as part of the DUNE (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment).

DUNE is a next-generation international experiment that will perform precision measurements of neutrino physics and search for important phenomena such as neutrino oscillations, nucleon decay and galactic supernova neutrino bursts. Currently in its construction phase, data-taking is due to begin towards the end of this decade.

Hosted by the US Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), DUNE is the flagship of the future US particle physics programme and forms a major part of the UK strategy for experimental particle physics. The UK government has so far invested a total of £65M in the production of key hardware and software components for DUNE.

In this latest tranche of funding, The UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has awarded Lancaster University £928,000 for the DUNE Anode Plane Assemblies (APA) project and £901,000 for the DUNE Reconstruction Software and Distributed Computing initiative.

These projects form part of a wider UK DUNE collaboration that is providing significant effort in areas key to the success of the DUNE project.

Led by Lancaster University Physics Professor Jaroslaw Nowak, the £928,000 DUNE Anode Plane Assemblies (APA) project will last 42 months and fund four members of staff as well as 10 part-time Physics undergraduates.

The APAs – Anode Plane Assemblies – are a critical component of the Liquid-Argon Time-Projection Chambers detectors (LArTPC), collecting the ionisation charge and allowing reconstruction of detector activity with mm-scale resolution. The APAs do this by reading out electrical signals from the particles produced in neutrino interactions. They are huge rectangular planes covered with thousands of copper-beryllium wires, about the width of a human hair.

The APA Production plan is to build 130 APAs with the help of university partners in the North West at the Daresbury Laboratory. The UK factory will be the biggest in the DUNE collaboration; the remaining 20 APAs will be produced at a factory operated by the University of Chicago in the USA.

The UK APA team have successfully demonstrated the manufacturing process by building APAs for the ProtoDUNE and SBND detectors. The UK technical staff have been leading the development of the APA-production procedures, based on ProtoDUNE experience, to allow mass production for DUNE.

The second STFC-funded project, led by Dr Andrew Blake and Co-Investigator Professor Jaroslaw Nowak, is providing £901,000 for DUNE Reconstruction Software and Distributed Computing, over a period of 54 months. This project will deliver the essential reconstruction software and computing systems that DUNE requires for its precision physics programme.

Lancaster University has a key role in the development of advanced pattern recognition algorithms for DUNE and ProtoDUNE, utilising the Pandora software toolkit that is widely used in experimental particle physics. Pandora carefully reconstructs complex neutrino interactions and provides key inputs for DUNE physics analyses. Over the next 4.5 years, through to the start of data-taking, the Lancaster group will collaborate on the development of Pandora for DUNE, harnessing state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and using the software to reconstruct test-beam data from the ProtoDUNE detectors.

Working alongside Dr Blake at Lancaster, Dr Dominic Brailsford is managing the software work stream in the STFC-funded project and coordinating the international DUNE reconstruction group. Dr Isobel Mawby is developing advanced machine learning algorithms for neutrino event reconstruction.

Dr Blake said: “DUNE is a game-changing experiment that will address many fundamental questions in the area of neutrino physics. This latest STFC funding places Lancaster University at the centre of both the hardware and software for DUNE, positioning us to play a key role in its science and discovery when the DUNE detectors come online at the end of the decade. This is an exciting time for neutrino physics at Lancaster University.”