Lisa Labuz: Fermilab in West suburban Batavia is home to a lot of particle physics research including DUNE, the deep underground neutrino experiment. Yep, DUNE. The goal is to learn about the neutrino. This elusive particle might hold the key to some of the biggest mysteries in our universe. Now, this is quite an undertaking featuring some underground caverns and a high energy beam that's going to be shot from Illinois to South Dakota. Sam Zeller is a senior scientist at Fermilab and deputy director of part of the project and spoke with WBEZ's Indi Khera.

Indi Khera: Hi Sam. 

Sam Zeller: Hi!

Indi Khera: So I want to start very simple. What is a neutrino?

Sam Zeller: Neutrinos are one of the most abundant particles in the universe and they're actually trillions pastoring passing through us every second. Neutrinos are produced in the sun and the atmosphere in a supernova burst. You know, so neutrinos are really interstellar messengers. And closer to home, we also produced neutrinos and particle accelerators such as those at Fermilab. And because neutrinos are so abundant and produced by so many different sources, they have profound implications for our understanding of the universe in many different ways.

Indi Khera: What other properties make these little particles so interesting to scientists like yourself?

Sam Zeller: Well, neutrinos have many strange and unique properties, some of which we're only recently learning about. And my favorite part about neutrinos is that they can change into different types as they travel. And we refer to this as neutrino oscillations. We know that there are three types of neutrinos and that they can oscillate from one type to another as they travel. It, you know, took us a long time as scientists understand this. But we're using this phenomenon of neutrino oscillation to answer a lot of important questions about neutrinos themselves and are working to try to make connections to the things we observe in the universe.

Indi Khera: And what can studying this oscillation like you said, through projects like DUNE, tell us about the universe.

Sam Zeller: Well we're hoping that DUNE will answer one of the biggest questions surrounding neutrinos, sort of the holy grail of neutrino physics at the moment. And that is whether or not neutrinos can help explain why we exist when the universe was formed at the time of the Big Bang, more than 13 billion years ago, equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created and that matter and antimatter should have annihilated, but that did not happen. And we know that because we are here. So there's something that caused the imbalance that avoided the cancelation of matter and antimatter in these very early stages of the history of our universe.

Indi Khera: You mentioned this imbalance. So would the neutrinos have been a part of that, that imbalance - is that what you mean, that they kind of are the key to that?

Sam Zeller: Exactly. And in order to get at that question we'll be producing in both beams of neutrinos and anti neutrinos at Fermilab to be a part of the DUNE experiment and we'll be looking very intently at whether or not those neutrinos and anti neutrinos behave in slightly different ways.

Indi Khera: In order to learn about these complex particles, you all have to design a pretty complicated experiment. Can you talk to me about the different moving parts of DUNE? How is all of this going to work?

Sam Zeller: In a nutshell, DUNE will be sending neutrinos an 800 mile distance from Fermilab to South Dakota. And this is a really big deal. We've never sent a beam of neutrinos from an accelerator this large a distance across the earth. There are parts of the project that are located here at Fermilab. And then there are other parts that will be based in South Dakota where we'll be housing sensitive detectors a mile underground to catch the neutrinos.

Indi Khera: What is so exciting to you about the potential answers? Or I guess even the questions that are unearthed by observing these neutrinos through DUNE?

Sam Zeller: I find it so exciting because we're really rewriting textbooks as we go. You know, when I was in college, studying particle physics and physics in general, you know, my textbook literally said that neutrino oscillations was too speculative a phenomenon to even be mentioned. What makes it really cool to me is that these are major discoveries happening, you know, in my life time, and really recently. They hold these connections to the universe because neutrinos are produced in so many ways and they are so abundant and they're around us all the time. So for me, I find it really intriguing that, you know, we can answer these big questions, we can rewrite textbooks and we can have this really intimate connections to, you know, how the universe works. And I find that just really mind bending.

Lisa Labuz: Sam Zeller is a senior scientist at Fermilab in Batavia and spoke with WBEZ's Indi Khera. This is WBEZ.

WBEZ transcripts are generated by an automatic speech recognition service. We do our best to edit for misspellings and typos, but mistakes do come through.