Excavation starts for U.S. particle physicists’ next giant experiment

Today, physicists and politicians gathered at a former mine in South Dakota to break ground for the United States’s next great particle physics experiment. Known as the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF), the experiment will fire a beam of elusive particles called neutrinos from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, to a gargantuan particle detector 1300 kilometers away in an abandoned gold mine in Lead, South Dakota.