Physicists begin their portion of science workshop

By Dirk Lammers, The Associated Press | Thursday, April 24, 2008

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LEAD -- Physicists on Thursday began three days of discussions about possible experiments for a Black Hills underground science laboratory.

The DUSEL Initial Suite of Experiments Workshop, which kicked off Monday in Lead and runs through Saturday, will help decide what research could be done 7,400 feet underground in the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory.

Construction of such a lab wouldn't begin until 2012 at the earliest, but the former Homestake gold mine already holds an important place in physics history.

In the late 1960s, chemist Ray Davis Jr. and astrophysicist John Bahcall built a giant steel tank 4,850 feet deep within Homestake to detect ghostly particles called neutrinos. The discovery earned Davis a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize in physics.

The Davis cavern, as it's now known, will soon house another physics experiment, and that prospect excites Davis' widow.

Anna Davis, who attended a banquet in Deadwood on Wednesday night, said she's proud of her husband's discovery and happy that the cavern that bears his name could once again contribute to science.

"He was a very modest man, so he would have been embarrassed about it," she said. "I don't mind boasting about him."

The National Science Foundation last year picked Homestake as the preferred site for a deep underground lab. In the interim, the state of South Dakota is building the Sanford Lab at Homestake at the 4,850-foot level.

One of the early physics experiments set to move into the Sanford lab's Davis cavern is one that seeks to detect dark matter, an unknown substance that may make up 80 to 90 percent of matter in the universe. Scientists know it exists because it has a gravitational force, but it's not visible.

The Large Underground Xenon detector experiment -- or LUX -- is a collaboration between Tom Shutt of Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Rick Gaitskell of Brown University in Providence, R.I., and Bob Svoboda of the University of California-Davis.

Svoboda was set to give a public lecture on dark matter Thursday evening in Spearfish.

Jose Alonso, director of the Sanford lab, said workers and engineers are installing water pumps to gain access to 4,850-foot-level's caverns and drifts, and the goal is to have the LUX experiment running by late this year or early next year.

On the Net:

Homestake DUSEL: http://www.lbl.gov/nsd/homestake/

Sanford Lab at Homestake: http://sanfordlaboratoryathomestake.org/