Hard times for the US's largest neutrino experiment could have an unexpected upside, speeding up the search for the elusive decay of a proton.
The Large Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE), due to begin operating in 2022, would send neutrinos from Fermilab in Illinois to a detector in the abandoned Homestake gold mine in South Dakota. How the neutrinos behave on the trip could help reveal why the universe is made of matter, with no antimatter in sight.
But the experiment's future appeared uncertain last week when US Department of Energy director William Brinkman said the agency could not fund the $1.5 billion project unless it could start delivering results before 2022.
One solution is to use the detector to hunt for decaying protons before the neutrino experiment starts, says LBNE co-spokesman Milind Diwan. Previous studies have set the lifetime of a proton to be at least 1034 years. With a detector as big as LBNE, one decay might be seen every year. Accomplishing both goals in the same project "would be very remarkable", Diwan says.
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