Making a statement about the subject, our Rector Prof. Dr. Mustafa Çalış said: “As part of the collaboration agreement between Erciyes University (ERU) and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), the second biggest accelerator laboratory in the world, Dr. Emrah Tiras and his research group have been working on international neutrino experiments: ANNIE and NOvA since 2020. Recently, our proposal to join DUNE experiment, which is being built in the US under the Fermilab and CERN cooperation with an estimate budget of $3-4 billion, has been accepted. Erciyes Neutrino Research Group (ENRG) is now an official collaborator of this experiment that will be the world’s largest neutrino experiment.”

Underlining that ENRG at ERU officially joined the EOS experiment, which is under construction at the University of California-Berkeley, our Rector continued his words as follows: “EOS is a detector research and development (R&D) project for future neutrino experiments, and it is supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) of the USA. Particle detector and accelerator technologies, which are not yet commercially produced in Turkey, have a wide range of applications from industrial products to health and life sciences. Thanks to the aforementioned collaborations, the information and technology transfer will continue to be provided for our country. In these projects, we are aiming to gain technological achievements and train qualified researchers in engineering and natural sciences. Consequently, Erciyes University will be able to continue to contribute to the goals of Türkiye to become a high-tech producing and exporting country. By virtue of the new collaborations, the first control center of international neutrino experiments in Türkiye is being established in the building of Research Centers and Laboratories at Erciyes University. In addition to this control center, a detector R&D and a big data analysis laboratories are under development, which will be one of the main laboratories in neutrino and particle physics studies for young researchers in Türkiye.”

Thanking those who contributed to the project, our Rector said: “I would like to thank our researcher, Dr. Emrah Tiras, and his research team for their contributions to our university and our country. I also thank the Fermilab and UC-Berkeley institutions for enabling our university to take part in this great organization and the administrators of DUNE and EOS experiments for their support.”

Dr. Emrah Tiras, a faculty member at the Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Erciyes University, thanked our Rector and ERU Management for their support in the project.

Giving information about the Control Center of the Neutrino Experiments that is under construction at ERU, Dr. Tiras said: “Neutrino studies are very important because neutrinos are the most abundant particles that have mass in the universe. The feature of neutrinos that has distinguished them from other particles in high energy physics and particle physics so far is that they do not fit into the Standard Model, which describes all the subatomic particles, four fundamental forces, and their interactions in the universe. Since neutrinos interact so weakly with matter, they provide us with information about their sources to a large extent. These neutrinos emitted spherically from the nuclear reactions in the sun and in the stars, the supernova explosions, and the nuclear reactors in the world inform us considerably about both the reactions in the reactors and the nuclear reactions in the space. To better understand the characteristics of these neutrino particles and develop neutrino applications in different fields in the future, we continue to conduct neutrino studies by means of the international collaborations we have carried out recently.”