In the hopes that America will host the next great particle discovery, a panel of physicists has proposed a $1 billion project to experiment with subatomic particles.
On Thursday, the committee urged for more research in neutrinos, tiny, elusive particles that have long mystified scientists. For the billion-dollar project, subatomic particles would be beamed 800 miles under ground from Chicago to South Dakota, The Associated Press reported.
If it receives approval and funding, the project would be the biggest for the U.S. for many years, according to panel chairman Steven Ritz of the University of California Santa Cruz.
"We want the U.S. to become the leaders in neutrino science," said Joe Lykken, a particle theorist at Fermilab and a member of the P5 group, as quoted by the Los Angeles Times. "We'd like to use that to bring the world here in the same way that the world went to CERN [European Organization for Nuclear Research] to discover the Higgs boson."
Coming from the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, also called P5, the report said the beam would be built at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois. The project would function "by shooting a high-powered beam of particles from Fermilab to a detector roughly 1,300 kilometers away," according to the L.A. Times.
Outlining steps for the ambitious scheme, the panel detailed suggested priorities for federal projects in physics over the next 20 years. The $1 billion neutrino beam would take around a decade to build and then could run for 20 years.
Unusual particles with barely any mass, neutrinos hardly ever interact with matter and come in three types. Billions of the subatomic particles pass through people every second, and a neutrino particle can abruptly switch from being one type to another.
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