Sergio Bertolucci

Sergio Bertolucci elected co-spokesperson of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) Collaboration for the next two years

DUNE is the new generation experiment under construction in the United States on the most intense neutrino beam. It has over 1400 participants, 217 institutions (including CERN) from 37 countries. DUNE will make use of two detectors placed on the beam line: a “near” detector located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois will record the neutrino interactions in the vicinity of the beam producing area, while the “far” detector, composed of four large Time Projection Chambers (~ 80,000 t of liquid Argon) will be located at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota, 1,300 km from the point of production and 1.5 km deep. The Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) will provide the neutrino beam and supporting infrastructure.

DUNE

In his role as Director of Research at CERN (2009-2015), Prof. Bertolucci played a decisive role in the launch of the LBNF-DUNE program which for the first time sees the adoption in the United States of a flagship program managed according to the CERN model (infrastructures held by the host institution, experiments owned by an international community), enlarging the scientific scope of CERN beyond the Geneva laboratory.

The DUNE experiment has a broad experimental program, including:
-the physics of neutrino oscillations: the main objective of the experiment is to determine the mass ordering of neutrinos and the possible violation of the CP symmetry in the lepton sector. These measurements could provide insight into the origin of matter-antimatter asymmetry, one of the fundamental issues in particle physics and cosmology.
– the decay of the proton: its observation would be a sensational discovery in particle physics and provide a key point for grand unification theories.
– the observation of stellar collapse neutrinos in our galaxy: the measurement of the neutrino flux from this source would provide unique information on the first stage of the nucleus collapse and on the formation of a neutron star.
Moreover, in consideration of the large statistics, DUNE will provide the most comprehensive set of measurements of neutrino induced reactions and will be sensitive to several signatures of physics beyond the Standard Model.

Since his arrival in Bologna in 2016 as Extraordinary Professor at the University of Bologna, prof. Bertolucci promoted the participation in DUNE of a large research group at the local INFN Division, and coordinated the Italian effort on the neutrino program in the USA, which sees the participation of a constantly growing national community.