Bridging Proposal for travel support for DUNE co-spokesperson

Professor Mark Thomson was elected as co-spokesperson of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) at the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF). DUNE/LBNF will be the largest particle physics project ever undertaken in the US. It involves firing an intense neutrino beam from Fermilab, near Chicago, to the DUNE far detector in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota; a distance of 1300 km. The DUNE far detector is conceived as four vast liquid argon time projection chambers (LAr-TPCs), each consisting of an active volume of 10,000 tons of liquid argon. The LAr-TPC technology provides 3D images of the particles produced in neutrino interactions. The experiment aims to discover CP violation in neutrino oscillations, which could explain the observed excess of matter over antimatter in the Universe. It also enables a powerful search for proton decay, which is predicted in Grand Unified theories, and is sensitive to neutrinos from core collapse super-novae. DUNE is a major international collaboration of almost 700 scientists (and rapidly growing). The installation of the far detector is planned for 2021.

This high-profile position will raise the profile of neutrino physics in the UK, with the potential to generate scientific interest in the public.