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The LBNE Science Collaboration
As of January 2013, more than 350 scientists and engineers from more than 60 institutions participate in the LBNE Science Collaboration, led by cospokespersons Bob Wilson (CSU) and Milind Diwan (BNL). The collaborators come from universities and national laboratories, including collaborators from the United States, India, Italy, Japan, and the UK.
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Strategic Plan
The proposed Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment would greatly advance research at the Intensity Frontier. It is one of the top priorities identified by the P5 panel.
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Neutrino Detectors
The LBNE Science Collaboration is advancing plans for a massive neutrino detector to find out whether neutrino interactions violate the matter-antimatter symmetry.
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Neutrino Beam
Fermilab’s Main Injector produces the world’s highest-intensity neutrino beam. Scientists plan to send the beam to the proposed Sanford laboratory. Project X would dramatically increase the intensity of the neutrino beam and provide proton beams for other experiments, too.
Over 350 people from over 60 institutions participate in the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE), working together to plan and develop both the experimental facilities and the physics program. LBNE is expected to be fully constructed and ready for operations in 2022. New collaborators are welcome.
LBNE plans a world-class program in neutrino physics that will measure fundamental physical parameters to high precision and explore physics beyond the Standard Model. The measurements LBNE makes will greatly increase our understanding of neutrinos and their role in the universe, thereby better elucidating the nature of matter and anti-matter.
How will LBNE work? LBNE will send the world's highest-intensity neutrino beam 800 miles through the Earth's mantle to a large detector, a multi-kiloton volume of target material instrumented such that it can record interactions between neutrinos and the target material. Neutrinos are harmless and can pass right through matter, only very rarely colliding with other matter particles. Therefore, no tunnel is needed; the vast majority of the neutrinos will pass through the mantle's material, and in turn, right through the detector. The experiment will thus need to collect data for a decade or two since neutrinos interact so rarely.
Fermilab, in Batavia, IL, is the host laboratory and the site of LBNE's future beamline, and the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), in Lead, SD, is the site selected to house the massive far detector. The term "baseline" refers to the distance between the neutrino source and the detector.
Why neutrinos?Neutrinos, astonishingly abundant yet not well understood, may provide the key to answering some of the most fundamental questions about the nature of our universe. The discovery that neutrinos are not massless, as previously thought, has opened a first crack in the highly successful Standard Model of Particle Physics. Neutrinos may play a key role in solving the mystery of how the universe came to consist only of matter rather than antimatter.
News and Events
The next LBNE Collaboration Meeting
will be held 22-24 March 2013 at Fermilab
(Agenda and more information to come)
December 10, 2012
LBNE ACHIEVES CD-1 APPROVAL FROM DOE
Bob Wilson elected co-spokesperson for LBNE
Fermilab Today, Dec 12, 2012
Wilson ... will replace outgoing spokesperson Bob Svoboda of UC Davis and will join Brookhaven National Laboratory's Milind Diwan in leading the LBNE collaboration.
Read more
DOE grants CD-1 approval to LBNE project
Fermilab Today, Dec 11, 2012
The U.S. Department of Energy on Monday granted Critical Decision 1 approval to the first phase of LBNE...
Read more
November 30 – December 2, 2012
LBNE Collaboration Meeting (link is password protected) was held in Houston, TX from Nov 30 to Dec 2.
35-ton Liquid Argon Prototype
cryostat construction is complete!
Keep abreast of the progress.
August 15, 2012 LBNE International Symposium on scientific opportunities within LBNE was held October 3, 2012 at Fermilab.
July 31, 2012Letter to European Strategy Preparatory Group This letter from the Director of Fermilab describes the major opportunities for collaboration between European institutions and Fermilab over the next two decades. LBNE and Project X provide unequaled opportunity for scientific discovery at the intensity frontier. Multiple additional opportunities exist for collaboration in significant but shorter-term experiments at Fermilab during the development and construction phases of LBNE and Project X.
LBNE Collaboration Meeting
This meeting was held 26-28 April 2012 at Fermilab.
Agenda and more information