Journey to the 'almost' center of the Earth - by Abe Schwartzrock

Dateline July 19, 2012. The culmination of our two weeks at Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) has finally arrived. Safety-training, history, and lessons/talks with scientists concerning the cutting edge science and experiments being installed and conducted nearly a mile below our feet have all prepared us well.

                Suited, very fashionably in fact, in our personal protective equipment, Bill Harlan (with trusty camera in hand), Peggy Norris, and Steve Gabriel accompanied us as we descended the wooden Yates shaft. As the cage was briskly lowered, a wall lined with dripping boards streaked through our view, black hallways (drifts) sweeping mysteriously by periodically.

                Bill and Peggy, along with geologist and laboratory supervisor, Tom Trancynger, LUX director Rick Gaitskell and other supervisors and workers guided us through the Davis Campus, including the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) and Majorana experimentation areas. While we had expected entry into the LUX to be impossible, upon our arrival we were pleasantly surprised to discover the deep cleaning process was behind schedule, allowing us to come within mere feet of the detector and the tank it will eventually occupy. The tank will allow the detection of cosmic ray muons so that when they create erroneous signals in the detector itself, these signals and their data can be ignored. The xenon itself in the actual detector will serve as a collision target for unsuspecting dark matter particles as they blow ethereally by and through us. The Majorana experiment, looking for neutrinoless double beta decay, was, unfortunately not so accessible, but through a window some of the ultra-pure copper being formed for the experiment was distinctly visible. The golenerd detectors were, for obvious reasons, strictly off limits except for highly qualified personnel.

                Tom Trancynger freely imparted his life lessons and geological perception to the group; moreover, he, Peggy, and Steve secured a spacious and nonintrusive corner of the campus in which to conduct a certain experiment of our own (supposedly the very control room of “Cosmic” Ray Davis himself during his famous first neutrino experiment). To quantify the degree of muon pollution at the 4850 foot level, my fellow Davis-Bahcall Scholars and I employed several muon detection kits from Fermilab to literally count the number of muons passing through our paddle-like scintillator (light emitting) detectors. After determining the best settings to eliminated background noise from radiation, we detected no muons during our stay. This is consistent with a result of about four muons per day that Peggy recorded using larger detectors. (We tested these again, but broken equipment did not allow them to be fully utilized.)

                The progress made at the Davis Campus is impressive, though we were somewhat disappointed that no more of the mine could be explored. It was also somewhat disappointing that the Golenerd Theory was not discussed in greater detail during our time deep below.

                Indubitably, this experience stands as one of the most unique and captivating of my life to date, putting the science of lectures and textbooks before my very eyes! A trip like this simply allows new “depths” of understanding.