On the 8th and 9th of June, the professor at the Gleb Wataghin Institute of Physics (IFGW) at Unicamp, Ettore Segreto, participated in the visit made by a Brazilian delegation of researchers to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, in the French acronym) , based in Switzerland. The meeting was attended by the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Luciana Santos, and parliamentarians. The meeting aimed to articulate Brazil's accession, as an associated country, to CERN, a process that should yield important scientific gains. The minister visited the facilities and experiments that count on the collaboration of Unicamp, such as ProtoDUNE, a prototype of the DUNE neutrino detector under construction in the United States, by Fermilab, a research center linked to the North American Department of Energy.
“This is very important for Brazil,” said Segreto about Brazil’s accession to CERN. “Many Brazilian researchers participate in experiments carried out there. Furthermore, possibilities open up for companies to partner in the development of technologies. It’s something good for the entire scientific community”, commented Segreto. To join CERN, Brazil must invest US$12 million per year, something that requires prior approval by the National Congress.
In a note issued by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, the minister highlighted that the innovations produced by CERN enable advances in the areas of health, industry and the environment. “This partnership will be of great importance for the Brazilian scientific community, but, mainly, for the national innovation-based industry. The government of President [Luiz Inácio] Lula [da Silva] is a priority to reindustrialize on new bases, with the aim of promoting and supporting technological development and innovation in national companies,” said Santos.
Fermilab representatives also participated in the visit, including Lia Merminga, director of the institution. She was at Unicamp in March this year in a workshop which celebrated the partnership between the University and the North American laboratory, having learned about some of the experiments developed by Unicamp, such as liquid argon cooling and purification technology and neutrino detection. Both will be used in DUNE, under construction in the State of South Dakota.
Participation in DUNE
The LBNF/Dune project (Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility and Deep Underground Neutrino Facility, in English) is a program for research into neutrinos and elementary particles that will make it possible to investigate new subatomic phenomena and expand knowledge about neutrinos and their role in the formation of universe. It consists of installing a large neutrino detector in Leads (South Dakota), 1.400 meters deep, to identify neutrinos emitted by a beam generated at the Fermilab headquarters, in the city of Batava (State of Illinois), located at a distance of 1.300 kilometers from the detector.
The neutrino detector in South Dakota will cover an underground area made up of three caves and equivalent to eight football fields. Equipment for detecting particles will be installed in two of them. A third, central cave will contain equipment responsible for the purification, circulation and condensation of argon, a noble gas used in liquid form for experiments. When fully operational, the DUNE facilities will use around 70 thousand tons of liquid argon.
Unicamp's participation in the project focuses on the development and scale production of equipment used to purify argon. The technology used in this process is developed in the IFGW laboratories, including the improvement of the inputs used to filter liquid argon. The technology used until then by Fermilab was able to capture oxygen, which disrupts the interaction between argon and neutrinos, essential for particle detection. With the technology developed by Unicamp, it will also be possible to capture nitrogen, increasing the purity of the liquefied gas and expanding the use of identification techniques, such as scintillation.
Another Unicamp contribution to the project is the presence in the X-Arapuca detector, a device created at the University and responsible for identifying the neutrino by capturing the light emitted from the interaction of the neutrino with the argon in the tanks. The expectation is that 1.500 of these devices will be installed on DUNE. The X-Arapuca technology was developed based on research carried out by professors Ettore Segreto and Ana Amélia Machado, from IFGW.
Read more:
Workshop celebrates partnership between Unicamp and Fermilab (USA)
US$3 billion project seeks to unravel questions about the composition of the universe
