This year physicists are also starting to build equipment for an experiment called LUX–ZEPLIN (LZ), which will try to detect particles of dark matter as soon as 2020. This fall SURF will debut a new experiment at the frontiers of physics: CASPAR, which mimics the conditions at the cores of stars where atoms of hydrogen and other light elements fuse to release energy, forming as a by-product the more substantial elements required for building asteroids, planets, mines and mammals. Today, stripped of much of its precious ore, the facility has become a figurative gold mine for researchers as the U.S.’s premier subterranean lab. This place was not always science-centric: For more than 100 years its labyrinth of deep chambers and drippy, dirt-floored tunnels was a gold mine called Homestake. And so, from the depths of Earth where even the very closest star does not shine, they are glimpsing some of the most ancient, distant and cataclysmic aspects of the cosmos. But these are the very particles scientists must study to understand how our universe came to be. Such particles are so dim that they’re drowned out aboveground: Looking for them there is a bit like looking for a spotlight shining from the sun’s surface. Here scientists can more easily detect various elusive cosmic messengers that would otherwise be swamped by the sound and fury at the surface-neutrinos that stream from our sun and from distant exploding stars or other hypothetical particles thought to make up the mysterious dark matter that acts as a hidden hand guiding the growth of galaxies. Entombed beneath the Black Hills by thousands of feet of solid rock, these experiments are shielded from much of the background radiation that bathes the planet’s surface. This place-the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, S.D.-hosts experiments that can only be conducted deep under Earth’s surface.
Water trickling down the shaft’s walls provides an unsettling sound track. We descend for 10 minutes, silently imagining the weight of the world above us increasing. The operator’s headlamp provides the only light, tracing along the timber that lines the shaft.
Soon it begins bumping down at 500 feet per minute. We look identical: in coveralls blinged out with reflective tape, steel-toed boots, an emergency breathing mask and a lamp that clips to the belt and loops over the shoulder.Īn operator opens the big yellow door, directs us inside and then closes The Cage. I show up on time, and prepare to board with a group of scientists. It descends at precisely 7:30 A.M.-the same time it leaves the surface every day-and doesn’t wait around for stragglers. The elevator that lowers them 4,850 feet down a mine shaft to a subterranean physics lab isn’t called an elevator, the physicists tell me.
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