The Boulby potash, polyhalite and salt mine on the northeast coast of England, the future site of Watchman, is Great Britain’s deepest mine and the home of the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Boulby Underground Laboratory. UC Berkeley and the Berkeley Lab are members of the collaboration, dubbed the Advanced Instrumentation Testbed, or AIT, which is funded by the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The initial project is called Watchman, for WATer CHerenkov Monitor of ANtineutrinos, and will be built by a large collaboration between researchers in the United States and United Kingdom, led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“These neutrino observations have very broad-ranging implications they could help us explain how we came to exist,” said Gabriel Orebi Gann, an assistant professor of physics and faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who is the UC Berkeley principal investigator for the new detector. This project will lay the groundwork for larger detectors capable of monitoring reactor operations from a distance of several hundred kilometers, helping nations track or restrict the production of fissile materials that can be used in nuclear weapons.īut physicists are also interested in detecting neutrinos and antineutrinos to discover the basic laws of the universe, in particular to learn why the universe today is composed mostly of normal matter with very little antimatter, when both should have been made in equal amounts during the Big Bang. The new detectors will be designed to measure the energy of such antineutrinos and the direction from which they come, allowing monitoring of reactors from a distance of 25 kilometers to verify nonproliferation agreements.

Nuclear reactions produce telltale antineutrinos – the antimatter counterpart of neutrinos. The Watchman detector would be placed in an excavated cavern 1,100 meters below ground at the Boulby mine in the United Kingdom and is slated to become operational in approximately 2023.

Neutrinos faster than light 2018