Richard
Schnee, Ph.D., head of the South Dakota Mines physics department, spent 2023
serving on a national particle physics panel which makes recommendations on what
types of physics research nationwide should be funded.
Schnee
was one of only two people on the 32-member panel – the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, known as P5 – who are not employed in a national laboratory
or at an R1 Carnegie classified higher education
institution. Members of the panel are nominated and chosen by the panel’s chair
and deputy chair. “Serving on P5 was an
enormous amount of work, but was a great honor,” says Schnee.
Formed
in 2002, the P5 convenes roughly once every eight years and spends an entire
year discussing research and projects with a 20-year timeframe in mind.
The
P5 presented its 2023 recommendations on December 7 and 8 to the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP), which
accepted the report and will subsequently advise the U.S. Department of Energy
and the National Science Foundation. Each agency then chooses how to distribute
its funding.
The
Department of Energy gave the P5 two budget scenarios to consider, the more
favorable of which takes into account inflation and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. The National Science
Foundation did not give a budget. The P5 made sets of recommendations for each
budget scenario and gave guidance as to what additional projects would be most
worthwhile to add if funding exceeded the more favorable scenario.
This
year’s recommendations include three major research areas that Mines faculty
are involved in: the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) at the Sanford
Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead; Generation 3 dark matter
detection, which could potentially be built as part of an expansion of SURF;
and IceCube.
DUNE
The
report recommends continued funding for the construction of two neutrino
detectors in DUNE, additional funding for a third, and plans to increase the
number of neutrinos in the beam which travels from Fermilab in the Chicago area
to DUNE. Ultimately,
scientists hope to learn more about neutrino oscillation – how a neutrino can
change itself to be any one of three types. Mines faculty participating in this
project are Juergen Reichenbacher, Ph.D., David Martinez Caicedo, Ph.D., and
Jingbo Wang, Ph.D.
Generation
3 Dark Matter Detection
The
largest dark matter detection experiments use liquid argon, such as Italy’s DarkSide-20k, or liquid xenon, like LUX-ZEPLIN that operates at SURF
(read more here). The report
recommends funding the next generation of dark matter detection experiments.
Mines faculty participating on LUX-ZEPLIN are Reichenbacher and Schnee.
IceCube
IceCube,
located at the geographic South Pole, detects neutrino activity through 5,000
sensors that run a cubic kilometer into the ice (read more here). The report
recommends funding for expansion of the detection area in the ice, as well as
adding a ground detection array and a radio antenna detection array. Mines
faculty participating in this project are Xinhua Bai, Ph.D., and Matthias Plum,
Ph.D.
“I’m
excited by the particle physics experiments of the next decades,” says Schnee,
“and the large roles that our faculty at Mines will be playing in them.”