Fermilab and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
NOvA Neutrino Project
The NOνA experiment, a collaboration of over 180 scientists from some 28 institutions, will be the world’s most advanced neutrino experiment. NOvA physicists will address the question “What happened to the antimatter in the universe?” The Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will send an intense neutrino beam from Fermilab in Illinois to the NOνA Detector Facility, a new international laboratory of the University of Minnesota’s School of Physics and Astronomy, in Ash River, about 40 miles southeast of International Falls, Minnesota.
Construction of the facility, supported under a cooperative agreement for research between the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Minnesota, is expected to generate 60 to 80 jobs plus purchases of materials and services from US companies.
When the 15,000-ton NOνA detector is complete and installed at Ash River, physicists will use it to analyze the mysterious behavior of neutrinos sent straight through the earth from Fermilab in Illinois to the NOvA detector in Minnesota. The neutrinos travel the 500 miles in less than three milliseconds.
Watch videos from the NOvA groundbreaking ceremony
