Liverpool City Region is at the centre of an ambitious international scientific project which is aiming to unravel the deepest mysteries of the universe.

A team of scientists and engineers at Daresbury Laboratory are working on developing and building hundreds of giant panels which will form part of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) in South Dakota.

Once completed, the panels created here in Liverpool City Region will be shipped out and installed in the underground argon detector in America.

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DUNE Anode Plane Construction Project UK Lead, Professor Justin Evans, said:

“We’ll be shipping them across to South Dakota, where there’s a disused gold mine, and installing them in the detector. You can think of these panels like the imaging part of a digital camera. By seeing which wire the electrons get captured on, you can build up an image of the particle interaction that happened in the argon detector. What we’re trying to do with this particle experiment is effectively understand the underlying physical laws of the universe.”

DUNE Anode Plane Construction Project Facility Construction Project Manager, Dr Hannagh Newton, said the work on this project was building up key skills within the city region.

“There’s lots of upskilling of the workforce here, through from the people involved in construction, engineering, alignment of things, checking of things, all the way through to the actual build and skilled technicians that we’ve got here today. And who knows what science we will discover as a result of these detectors being located in the far detector in South Dakota.”

Prof Evans added:

“People around the world know the name of Daresbury. Just the ability and the innovation to come up with new particle accelerated designs is absolutely unparalleled, but this also creates a huge number of jobs. We’re also placing quite big contracts with local companies as well. So it’s bringing money, jobs and reputation to the area.”