KAIPING: Far beneath the lush landscape of southern China, a sprawling subterranean laboratory aims to be the world’s first to crack a deep scientific enigma. China has emerged as a science powerhouse in recent years, with the country’s Communist leadership ploughing billions of dollars into advanced research to contend with the United States and other rivals.

Its latest showpiece is the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (Juno), a state-of-the-art facility for studying the minuscule subatomic particles.

The project is an “exciting” opportunity to delve into some of the universe’s most fundamental — but elusive — building blocks, according to Patrick Huber, director of the Centre for Neutrino Physics at the American university Virginia Tech, who is not involved in the facility’s research.

The lab is reached by a funicular train that travels down a tunnel to a cavern built 700 metres underground to limit radiation emissions. Inside stands the neutrino detector, a stainless steel and acrylic sphere around 35 metres in diameter, crisscrossed by cables.

Researchers will use Juno to detect neutrinos emitted by two Chinese nuclear power plants, each located 53 kilometres away. They will then use the data to tackle something called the “mass hierarchy” problem, believed to be crucial for improving theories of particle physics.

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2024