Scientists are looking forward to building a billion-dollar particle beam to implement their plans of blasting neutrinos 1,200km underground, from Chicago to South Dakota.

Steven Ritz from the University of California Santa Cruz is part of committee made up of high-profile US scientists seeking an invisible neutrino beam, which seems to be the biggest US particle physics project in many years.

However, Ritz said Europe's Large Hadron Collider would still dwarf the project. Neutrinios are electrically neutral and have very low mass. They have the ability to pass through normal matter because they are impervious to electromagnetic forces.

The federal government was told on Thursday by the committee of experts that this is the right time for the US to build a billion-dollar project to beam ghostlike subatomic particles 800 miles underground west from Chicago to the high plains of South Dakota.

This project will be very helpful for scientists to gain deeper insights into these puzzling particles. The panel said the neutrino beam is in a list of top priority project for federal particle physics research. Overhaul of the European collider and the creation of a Japanese subatomic particle smasher are other big projects.

If the neutrino project gets the approval, then it will take about 10 years to build and could run for another 20 years.

"What CERN (the European collider operator) did for the Higgs boson, we want to do with the neutrino", said Joe Lykken, a particle theorist at Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Chicago.

Scientists will aim the beam at an old mine in Lead, South Dakota, after creation at lab. And then, they will use a 50,000-ton (45,350-metric ton) detector to spot an incredibly minute fraction of the particles.