Crews at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) have moved approximately 39% of the I-beam steel required for the construction of the cryostat for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). This amounts to nearly 2 million pounds (900 metric tons) of steel, which completely fills the south cavern—a structure 500 feet long, 65 feet wide, and about seven stories tall—located 1.5 kilometers underground in the former Homestake gold mine in Lead, South Dakota.

DUNE is an international neutrino physics experiment designed to study the properties of these elusive particles. The cryostat is a crucial component that will house the liquid argon detector, which will record neutrino interactions. This infrastructure development highlights the progress in the construction phase of the experiment, which aims to unravel fundamental mysteries such as the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe and the mass of neutrinos.