DUNE Data Acquisition Project Stage 2

A neutrino beam fired from Fermilab will travel 1300 kilometres through the Earth to a set of detectors buried 1500 metres underground, and this project builds the system that decides which of the resulting data to keep. Neutrinos are the most abundant matter particles in the universe but remain poorly understood because they barely interact with anything. DUNE, the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, aims to measure their properties with unprecedented precision, to understand why the universe contains far more matter than antimatter, and to detect the neutrino burst from a nearby supernova. The detectors use liquid argon to capture neutrino interactions, but they generate data at a huge rate. The data-acquisition system built here will receive that torrent, perform real-time processing to identify scientifically interesting events, and discard the rest. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. It addresses open questions about the fundamental laws of physics—why matter exists at all, and how neutrinos behave. Similar curiosity-driven experiments have historically led to unexpected breakthroughs, such as the development of the World Wide Web at CERN. A deeper understanding of neutrino properties could, in the long term, reshape how we think about the universe and might eventually inform new technologies for detecting particles or managing data at extreme scales.