RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – Thousands of people stopped by Lead and Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) Saturday for the city’s annual Neutrino Day celebration.
“Neutrino Day is a celebration of all things science hosted by the Sanford Underground Research Facility and the community of Lead,” SURF Media Relations Manager Mike Ray said. “It’s a city-wide science festival that happens every year on the second Saturday of July and it has been a fantastic day.”
With Saturday’s pleasant weather in the Northern Hills, Neutrino Day organizers saw a healthy turnout.
Neutrinos are neutrally-charged subatomic particles. Despite their abundance in the universe, they are difficult to detect.
Neutrino research at SURF is about to ramp up significantly. In early 2026, the team of scientists and engineers will begin constructing the first of four neutrino detectors nearly a mile underground. Once completed, SURF will partner with Fermilab in the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).
“By going a mile underground, we protect ourselves, we hide ourselves, essentially, from cosmic neutrinos,” DUNE Project Manager Jolie Macier said. “And then we can detect, instead, the ones that we are sending from Fermilab.”
SURF is located about 800 miles from Fermilab – a distance Fermilab Physicist Vishvas Pandey described as ideal. Sending a neutrino from one location to another would be a significant scientific breakthrough.
“This is a big, big deal,” Pandey said. “As a physics community, as scientists, we have been looking forward for decades to have a megaproject like this. Because neutrinos are tiny and shy and mysterious, but they hold the key to some of the biggest questions in the universe.”
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