Getting to an experimental cavern 6800 feet below the surface in Sudbury, Ontario, requires an unusual commute. The Cage, an elevator that takes people into the SNOLAB facility, descends twice every morning at 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. Before entering the lab, individuals shower and change so they don’t contaminate the experimental areas.
A thick layer of natural rock shields the clean laboratory where air quality, humidity and temperature are highly regulated. These conditions allow scientists to carry out extremely sensitive searches for elusive particles such as dark matter and neutrinos.
The Cage returns to the surface at 3:45 p.m. each day. During the winter months, researchers go underground before the sun rises and emerge as it sets. Steve Linden, a postdoctoral researcher from Boston University, makes the trek every morning to work on MiniCLEAN, which scientists will use to test a novel technique for directly detecting dark matter.
“It’s a long day,” Linden says.
Scientists and engineers have spent the past eight years designing and building the MiniCLEAN detector. Today that task is complete; they have begun commissioning and cooling the detector to fill it with liquid argon to start its search for dark matter.
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