For one of the engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, it feels like it was only yesterday the lab's neutrino detection system first was proposed.
About eight years later, the neutrino detection system was placed inside the laboratory's Short-Baseline Near Detector hall following a successful cross-campus move, according to a Fermilab news release.
"It’s like taking your baby to the first day of school," Fermilab mechanical engineer Shishir Shetty, who helped design the transport system, said in the news release. "So many people have put their time and effort into building the detector and planning for the move, and now we are finally at the point where we get to see the results of those efforts."
Fermilab mechanical engineer Shishir Shetty
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Fermilab's neutrino detection system — first proposed 2014, was moved from the warehouse-like building — where for years it was planned, constructed and tested, to its Short-Baseline Near Detector hall about three miles across Fermilab's site in Batavia, Ill., the release reported There was a great deal of anticipation among the scientists who've been working on the neutrino detection system for so long and then oversaw the move.
"Many people at Fermilab have worked together to make this happen — physicists, students, technical staff, administration, procurement," Anne Schukraft, neutrino scientist and SBND technical coordinator, said, according to the release. "It has been great to get everyone’s input and to learn from everyone's expertise. It has been a true team effort."
"That is when we will be extremely happy," Shetty said in the release. "You will see a lot of smiles."
The nearly 20-foot cube is about the size of a small house, weighs 20,000 pounds and contains delicate sensors and wiring that can't be "rattled too much" because it might compromise the system's integrity, the news release said.
"During transportation, we need to keep everything aligned," Monica Nunes, a guest scientist who coordinated the SBND, said in the release. "The detector was built to be transported, but a move like this — with a system that has such a high center of gravity — has never been done at Fermilab before."
With the neutrino detection system now settled into its new hom, scientists will use a beam of particles to examine atomic collisions in hopes of better understanding the mysterious properties of neutrinos, according to the release.
"This will give us a dataset that will be 20 to 30 times larger than the current neutrino-argon interaction data set, which will allow us to do measurements that have never been done before," Ornella Palamara, a Fermilab neutrino scientist and co-spokesperson for the international SBND collaboration, said in the release. "To finally have data will be really exciting. We have been working toward this for eight years."
