Photograph credit score: Yuexiang Liu / Institute of Excessive Power Physics
Deep beneath the granite hills of Guangdong, China, a giant experiment has simply began. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory, or JUNO, started taking knowledge on August 26, 2025 after greater than 10 years of planning and building.
JUNO is 700 meters underground to guard in opposition to cosmic radiation, and centered round a 35.4 meter diameter acrylic sphere stuffed with 20,000 tons of a particular liquid known as linear alkyl benzene. When a neutrino (particularly an antineutrino from the adjoining nuclear reactors) hits this liquid, a faint blue mild is produced. Across the sphere are 43,200 photomultiplier tubes, or PMTs, every with a brilliant delicate golden eye that catches these flashes and converts them into electrical alerts that scientists can examine. The sphere is floating in a 44 meter deep pool of extremely pure water, which is monitored by 2,400 extra PMTs to filter out cosmic muons. That is 20 instances greater than any earlier detector of its type.
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Neutrinos are nearly massless, electrically impartial and might undergo matter as if it was not there. However they maintain secrets and techniques that may change our understanding of physics. JUNO’s predominant purpose is to find out if the third neutrino kind, v₃, is heavier than the second, ν₂. That is extra than simply educational trivia; the reply can change our understanding of the universe, make clear why matter dominates antimatter and the way stars and galaxies fashioned. JUNO measures antineutrinos from the Taishan and Yangjiang nuclear energy vegetation, 53 km aside, and catches about 45 of those interactions per day, increase an power spectrum over time to disclose the mass hierarchy.
In contrast to earlier assessments, its measurements usually are not affected by the Earth’s matter or entangled in complicated parameter correlations. The detector’s power decision is unbeatable as a result of transparency of the acrylic sphere and the sensitivity of its PMTs, with tiny 3-inch tubes filling the gaps between the bigger 20-inch ones for max protection. Early knowledge from the commissioning runs, together with a reactor neutrino occasion on August 24, 2025 with energies of 5.7 MeV and a pair of.2 MeV, present JUNO is already beating expectations. This precision can deliver the neutrino oscillation parameters right down to 1%, a giant enchancment over Daya Bay’s 4-7%.
Past its predominant purpose, JUNO will snoop on neutrinos from the Solar, giving us real-time views of photo voltaic exercise. It may possibly detect alerts from distant supernovae, analyze geoneutrinos from Earth’s radioactive decay to grasp mantle circulation, and even search for sterile neutrinos or proton decay. With a 30-year life, JUNO has a future improve path to hunt for neutrinoless double-beta decay, a uncommon phenomenon that will show whether or not neutrinos are their very own antiparticles—a consequence that will change the particle physics textbooks.
This $376 million mission has concerned over 700 teachers from 74 universities in 17 international locations, together with groups from the College of California, Irvine, the Technical College of Munich, and others in France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Taiwan. China is funding over 80% of the mission and has drawn closely from the Daya Bay experiment which ran from 2011 to 2020 and was globally acclaimed for locating a important neutrino oscillation section. The UC Irvine crew is the one US college with full participation, having labored on design, meeting and now knowledge processing with funding from the Nationwide Science Basis.
Constructing JUNO was no straightforward process. The acrylic sphere has partitions 120mm thick and weighs over 600 tons, the biggest of its type ever made. Filling it with 20,000 tons of liquid scintillator and displacing 60,000 tons of water required centimeter-level precision to keep away from structural collapse. Each part, from the cleanliness of the liquid to the calibration of the PMTs needed to meet tight standards. “It required not solely new concepts and know-how but in addition years of meticulous planning, testing and persistence,” mentioned JUNO’s head engineer Ma Xiaoyan.
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