SBND, the Short-Baseline Near Detector, is a liquid argon time projection chamber sitting close to the Booster Neutrino Beam target at Fermilab. It is the near detector of the Short-Baseline Neutrino program, measuring the beam as produced while the ICARUS detector downstream looks for the effects of oscillation. SBND recorded its first neutrino interactions in 2024 and began its physics run that December; it now sees several thousand neutrino interactions a day, the largest sample of neutrino interactions in liquid argon ever collected. Its goals are to test whether a fourth, sterile neutrino explains past anomalies, to make precision measurements of neutrino interactions on argon that feed directly into DUNE, and to search for light dark-sector particles produced in the beam. The collaboration brings together more than 200 physicists from about 40 institutions in five countries, with University of Chicago professor David Schmitz as co-spokesperson.
In 2026 MANIAC Lab brought the Pile cluster back into service for the UChicago SBND group and its students. Pile runs on a Kubernetes substrate and provides interactive login nodes, HTCondor batch computing, CVMFS access to Fermilab software, shared project storage for ntuples and derived data frames, and a Globus data transfer endpoint for moving datasets from Fermilab. It extends the Analysis Facility model, built for the LHC, to a neutrino experiment with modest, well-defined needs.
(Photo: SBND detector installation, Fermilab)
