Construction and delivery of anode plane assemblies for the DUNE long-baseline neutrino experiment

The DUNE experiment will investigate some of the most profound questions in science by studying one of natures most difficult particles to detect: the neutrino. A beam of neutrinos will be produced at the Fermilab particle accelerator in Chicago, and sent 1,300 km to a new detector deep in a disused gold mine in South Dakota. As the neutrinos travel, they undergo a quantum-mechanical process called oscillation in which they change their nature.

By measuring these changes, we can probe questions such as why the universe is made of matter rather than antimatter: how did everything we see come to be? We can also look for neutrinos coming from supernovae: explosions of dying stars that are some of the universe's most spectacular events; and we will be able to improve our understanding of how these explosions happen, and how black holes are formed from what is left behind.

With this proposal, we will be building key parts of the DUNE detector that will sit a mile underground in South Dakota. We will build anode planes: 6x2.3 m planes of copper wire that capture the electrons produced in 10,000 tonnes of liquid argon when neutrinos hit that argon. We will build 137 of these anode planes, which are the eyes of the detector: allowing us to visualise, with mm scale precision, what happens when neutrinos interact with matter.