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South Dakota Science and Technology Authority
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Welcome to Underground Science
 Dr. Ray Davis inspects his neutrino detector under construction in the Homestake gold mine. (1965) A laboratory 4,850 feet underground in the Homestake gold mine in Lead, South Dakota, helped start a revolution in physics. |
The vision for underground research at Homestake.
South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds joins scientists who are already working at the Sanford Underground Laboratory. The DUSEL Plan An NSF DUSEL at Homestake The National Science Foundation’s DUSEL at Homestake, would have campuses from the surface down to 8,000 feet. Click Here...
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By late last week, a Sanford Underground Lab crew had removed 13,000 tons of rock to enlarge the Davis Cavern and create the new Transition Cavern in a campus 4,850 feet underground. The crew of 11, which includes nine former Homestake miners, has been working two 10-hour shifts a day to complete the project.| "Hunting WIMPs" draws 100 in Pierre |
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| Friday, 22 January 2010 10:12 | ||
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Last month, in fact, dark matter made headlines around the world when researchers announced they had discovered a possible hint of the substance in an experiment deep in a former iron mine in northern Minnesota, but those results were inconclusive. Dr. Gaitskell and Dr. Shutt previously worked on that Minnesota experiment. Now they've assembled a team of scientists and engineers from nine universities and two national laboratories to build a different kind experiment.* It's called the Large Underground Xenon detector, or LUX, and it will be the most sensitive dark-matter detector of its kind ever built. Dr. Shutt said that if WIMPs exist, we should be able to detect them on earth -- if the detector is sensitive enough. "Some 30 percent of the universe is in the form of a dark matter fundamentally different from ordinary matter," Dr. Shutt says. "Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs, created in the big bang, are one of the most promising ideas for what this dark matter could be." Next Tuesday's lecture -- "Hunting WIMPs in the Black Hills" -- will be for general audiences, and especially for students. The Sanford Lab's "Deep Science for Everyone" lecture series already has introduced more than 3,000 South Dakotans to some of the world's top scientists, and Dr. Gaitskell already is doing outreach on his own. During a recent day of skiing at Terry Peak, near Lead, he found himself giving a chairlift talk about dark matter to some young students. "These were snowboarders," Dr. Gaitskell said. "Fourteen-year-olds. And when they said 'Cool!' I really think they meant it. You could see something switching on inside them." The LUX dark-matter detector will be the first major physics experiment at the Sanford Lab. The South Dakota Science and Technology Authority is re-opening Homestake to a depth of 4,850 feet, but the former gold mine has shafts and tunnels as deep as 8,000 feet underground. The National Science Foundation is considering an even bigger proposal to make Sanford Lab at Homestake a national lab -- the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, or DUSEL (pronounced "DOO-suhl."). A Homestake DUSEL would be the largest, deepest underground laboratory in the world, with experiments in physics, geology and biology. LUX collaborating institutions:
Where and When:Tuesday, Jan. 26, 7 P.M. For more information:http://luxdarkmatter.org/collaboration.html Download a flier for your school, classroom or business.Live webcast: http://www.sdpb.org/livewebcasts |