Site Visit: NEXT neutrino experiment at Canfranc Underground Laboratory (LSC)
Canfranc, Aragón Valley of north-eastern Spain
May 14-18, 2016
Project Statement
Looking out from the offices of Canfranc Underground Laboratory, Spain 2016
At the invitation of astroparticle physicist, fiction writer, and poet Juan José Gómez Cadenas, co-spokesperson with David Nygren of the Neutrino Experiment with a Xenon TPC (NEXT) at the Canfranc Underground Laboratory near the France/Spain border in the Spanish Pyrenees, I attended an official Scientific Review of the experiment before it commenced. I was also given the honorary role of poet-in-residence of the experiment. I attended detailed reports on the experiment, toured the experiment underground, and spoke with the experiment’s collaborators, who attended from all over the world.
I had been introduced to Dr. Gómez Cadenas months earlier by the poet Rae Armantrout. He had helped translate some of her physics-inspired poems from English for a Spanish edition of her work, and they met during her visit to the University of Valencia. In addition to talking with Dr. Gómez Cadenas about NEXT and the relationship between poetry and physics, I had significant conversations with physicist Aldo Ianni as well as physicist David Sinclair when we traveled to Zaragoza to depart after the review was over. Dr. Sinclair and I discussed chirality or handedness in neutrinos as well as SNOLAB, the Canadian underground science laboratory with which he is affiliated that specializes in neutrino and dark matter research, and the special heavy water it once used.
Neutrinos, one of the lightest and most mysterious particles, are promising candidates for dark matter. My research with the NEXT Experiment focused on the Majorana neutrino, a hypothesized particle that contains its own antiparticle, or what is known as a positron, a form of anti-matter. I had arrived to Canfranc directly from CERN, where I had just learned about the significance of matter and anti-matter asymmetry at the Antiproton Decelerator, or Anti-Matter Factory.
NEXT is an experiment in neutrinoless double-beta decay, where two neutrons inside the nucleus of an atom are simultaneously transformed into two protons, or vice versa. An observation of neutrinoless double-beta decay would determine that the neutrino being observed is a Majorana particle. The discovery of Majorana particles could have major impacts on quantum computing and other technology as well as lead to greater understanding of not only dark matter but the function of neutrinos.
My site visit to the Canfranc Underground Laboratory and research on the NEXT Experiment in Canfranc culminated the following year in a 40-page poem-essay, “The Positron Passport,” forthcoming in the academic journal, CounterText: A Journal of the Post-Literary, published by Edinburgh University Press, in an issue on American Experimental Poetry, guest edited by literary scholar Ming-Qian Ma. The essay-poem is inspired by my site visits to both Canfranc Underground Laboratory and CERN in 2016.
