China's second underground neutrino lab breaks ground

A large underground laboratory for neutrino experiments broke ground Saturday in Jiangmen of south China's Guangdong Province.

The lab will be built 700 meters underground and put into operation in 2020, said Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the project's spokesman from the Chinese side.

It is designed to operate for at least 20 years and will be equipped with the world's most precise and biggest liquid scintillation detector for neutrino, Wang said.

It is about 53 km away from the nuclear reactors in Yangjiang and Taishan cities, a perfect location for such experiments, he said.

In 2012 through the neutrino experiment conducted near the Daya Bay Reactor also in Guangdong, Chinese and foreign physicists announced that they had confirmed and measured a third type of neutrino oscillation.

Once completed, the Jiangmen lab will be the second Chinese neutrino project and it will help scientists determine the neutrino mass hierarchy, Wang said.

"It will help us to better understand the rules of the universe and the particle world," he said.

More than 320 scientists from 45 research institutes and universities around the world have formally joined the project led by Chinese scientists.