The LUX ZEPLIN (LZ) collaboration has received a major award from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science to support a year of research and development leading to a second-generation dark-matter experiment. Co‑principal investigators of LUX ZEPLIN are Gil Gilchriese of Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division and Tom Shutt of Case Western Reserve University. Bill [...]

MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR’s First Detector Units

On Wednesday, May 30, the Sanford Underground Research Facility officially opened its Davis Campus, almost a mile deep in the former Homestake gold mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The event brought over 60 visitors including officials from federal and state government, scientists from universities and national laboratories, and local and national media. Berkeley Lab is the U.S. Department of Energy’s lead institution for this marked advance in underground science.

The May 30, 2012 dedication of the Davis Campus of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), 4,850 feet down in South Dakota’s Homestake Mine, marks the official debut of research dedicated to solving some of the most challenging puzzles in 21st-century science. What is the nature of dark matter? What secrets are mysterious neutrinos still hiding? Shielded from cosmic rays by almost a mile of solid rock overhead, supersensitive experiments at the Sanford Lab’s Davis Campus are searching for the answers.

Neutrinos may be even stranger than they seem, if indeed they are the only fermions (particles of matter) that are their own antiparticles. Proof would be a rare form of radioactive decay called neutrinoless double-beta decay, which could only be seen if there’s virtually no background interference. The MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR now under construction at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in the Black Hills of South Dakota aims to prove these near-perfect conditions can be met.

U.S. Department of Energy scientists and administrators join members of the National Science Foundation and South Dakota’s Sanford Underground Laboratory for the deepest journey yet to the proposed site of the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL).