May 8, 2026

5 min read

Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm

A massive neutrino experiment is taking shape in an abandoned gold mine

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment will study nature’s most mysterious particle a mile beneath South Dakota’s Black Hills and will potentially reveal the origins of matter

By Joseph Howlett edited by Lee Billings

One of two massive caverns a mile beneath the town of Lead, S.D. Physicists just began constructing an enormous particle detector here to study their least understood particle, the neutrino.

605 Media & Entertainment/Clark Young

The U.S.’s most ambitious particle physics project ever is one step closer to reality.

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) will be a giant in both budgetary and basic science terms: A cavernous, multibillion-dollar Department of Energy facility one mile below the town of Lead, S.D., that will serve as a catcher’s mitt for ghostly particles, called neutrinos, beamed from a lab in Illinois.

Particle physicists hope DUNE will finally settle the biggest open questions in their most coherent picture of the universe, the Standard Model. It might even speak to humanity’s oldest question of all: why we (or any matter at all) even exist.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Now that existential catcher’s mitt is finally getting built. At an event yesterday at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead—formerly the Homestake gold mine—project leaders and government supporters gathered to sign the first steel beam to be sent underground, beginning the construction of the facility’s detectors.

“As a South Dakotan, knowing that on this ground, our little piece of the planet, the fact that we are going to transform our understanding of matter is pretty incredible,” said Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota. DUNE is funded primarily through the Department of Energy. But it is an international collaboration involving 38 countries—the 10 million pounds of steel for the first vessel were contributed by CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics.

“DUNE has been the dream of many in the physics community for more than two decades,” says Sowjanya Gollapinni, co-spokesperson of the DUNE collaboration. “It’s the moment when this becomes real.”

The neutrino is a nearly weightless particle that sails through matter like a phantasm. No other known particle is so shy in its interactions—a neutrino can traverse a light-year-long block of lead without touching a single atom. It’s also a shape-shifter; produce one of the three neutrino “flavors” in a beam heading west from New York City, and by the time your friend in Los Angeles measures it, that neutrino will likely be a different flavor.

These mind-bending properties are why the neutrino remains the least-understood of all the Standard Model’s characters. Physicists can’t even say how the three neutrino masses are ordered, let alone nail down their exact values. They hope the particle’s oddities might conceal an answer to an almost philosophical question that the Standard Model raises: Why is there something rather than nothing?

The neutrino’s connection to such weighty matters rests on the fact that basically every fundamental matter-generating process also makes antimatter in equal numbers. Yet the outcome of the big bang was somehow a tiny sliver more matter than antimatter—all the galaxies, dust and living things in the universe belong to this minuscule excess. Many physicists suspect the weird shape-shifting behavior of neutrinos might have played a key role in this cosmic conundrum.

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) project and government representatives commemorated the start of the facility’s construction by signing the first steel beam to be sent underground.

605 Media & Entertainment/Landin Burke

Scientists have been studying neutrino “oscillation” for decades by beaming neutrinos from sources (such as particle colliders or nuclear reactors) to faraway detectors. Then they measure how many of the neutrinos have changed flavor in transit.

DUNE aims to push this approach to its limit. Physicists will use a particle accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., to produce the most intense beam of neutrinos ever—a companion to DUNE officially dubbed the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF). The LBNF will be pointed downward and westward from Fermilab, aimed directly at the heart of DUNE’s cavern below Lead, 800 miles away, which will be filled with tens of millions of pounds of liquid argon.

“Everything about DUNE is unprece