The Department of Energy on 8 January granted Fermilab initial approval to begin work on the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment, which would study the shy, mysterious and chargeless particle that rarely interacts with matter and was only discovered to have mass (a tiny bit) in the late 1990s.

LBNE would generate a beam of neutrinos on the Fermilab campus and send it more than 1,000 kilometres away to huge detector vats at DUSEL, a proposed laboratory in an abandoned mine in South Dakota. The experiments could help explain why, after the Big Bang created nearly equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, matter dominates today. It could also reveal the interactions between three neutrino “flavors”, which mix with each other as they travel over long distances.

The experiment is in keeping with the P5 prioritization report from two years ago, which recommended neutrino research as being important. It would extend the research begun by Nova, and compete with the T2K long baseline experiment in Japan. Fermilab, the traditional home of high-energy physics in the US, is trying to find a niche that will occupy its scientists now that the Tevatron has ceded the energy frontier to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and this would indicate that neutrinos will be Fermilab’s bread and butter for some time to come.

But there’s a sneaky way to use neutrino experiments to get back to particle smashing. Another goal for Fermilab is Project X, which would not only provide LBNE with a more powerful beam of neutrinos, but could also be modified to produce beams of muons, which are like heavier but more ephemeral electrons. If built a few decades from now (if built at all), a muon collider could be a way for Fermilab to reclaim the energy frontier from CERN.

Image: symmetry magazine