Nicola McConkey, a post-doctoral researcher from the University of Sheffield, with her violin in one of the ProtoDUNE cryostats at CERN (Image: Roberto Acciarri/CERN)
In a huge warehouse at CERN sit two giant boxes – the cryostats of the protoDUNE experiment – both red on the outside and a glittering silvery-gold on the inside. Stop and listen and you might hear the screech of welding metal, the beep of cranes moving overhead or the whir of vacuum cleaners keeping the equipment dust-free. Rarely will you hear the sweet sound of a violin…
That changed one lunchbreak, when Nicola McConkey, a post-doctoral researcher from the University of Sheffield brought in her violin to entertain her colleagues. Clothed in her clean-room outfit, she stepped inside one of the giant cryostats and began to play. Hear the results for yourself.
Nicola is working on the construction of ProtoDUNE, and has been playing the violin since she was a child.
"It's a wonderful team of people here building ProtoDUNE, and so when it came up in conversation that I'd brought my violin with me to CERN, we soon turned to pondering the acoustics inside the cryostat. Over our lunchbreak the next day we tried it out. For me it was like two worlds had collided, it was really exciting to play music right inside of where our detector will soon be! I can report that the acoustics are pretty good - lots of reverb!" - Nicola McConkey, violinist and post-doctoral researcher from the University of Sheffield.
This isn’t the first time that people at CERN have combined their passions for science and for music. When CERN celebrated its 60th birthday in 2014, physicists and engineers played sonified data inside experimental caverns and control rooms, see for yourself here.
At ProtoDUNE, detectors are still arriving to be inserted into the two cryostats, which internally have a height of 7.9 m and a length and width of 8.5 m. In the coming months, these cryostats will be sealed and filled with approximately 800 tonnes of liquid argon to cool them so that testing can begin using a dedicated beam line at CERN’s SPS accelerator complex.
These prototypes are testing two variations – single-phase and dual-phase – of a detection technique first developed by Nobel laureate, and former CERN director-general, Carlo Rubbia. They are a smaller-scale version of detectors planned for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). DUNE is an international experiment hosted by Fermilab in the United States that will be built underground and catch neutrinos: tiny fundamental particles that rarely interact with matter.