The folks at the Sanford Underground Laboratory at Homestake held Neutrino Day in Lead, South Dakota last Saturday, and my family and I joined them for this fun and interesting time. 

Neutrino Day is a presentation in the Black Hills town of Lead (pronounced "LEED"), where the old Homestake Gold Mine was bringing up gold until about 2002.

At the time it was the deepest gold mine in the country at well over a mile deep. When it was no longer cost effective to dig up the gold, the mining operation was shut down.

But scientists saw opportunities in the old mine. They thought that if they set up a laboratory deep underground they could study things like neutrinos in ways they never could on the surface or even at more shallow depths.

So new life has been breathed into the mine with the creation of the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL).

Workers have been pumping out water that has filled a lot of the mine since it was shut down in 2002, but they now have the water out to a depth of around 5,000 feet. According to the Rapid City Journal, the lab is now getting ready to start experiments:

The first experiment to be installed will be the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter detector. That project will be conducted by a collaboration of universities led by Brown and Case Western Reserve universities.

The second experiment, into a phenomenon called neutrinoless double beta decay, will be conducted by a collaboration that includes 19 institutions from four countries.

Both sets of experiments, like the Davis research, require labs deep underground to protect them from cosmic radiation.

Dr. Jose Alonso, director of the Sanford Lab, said the LUX work underground won’t start for another 12 months, but other LUX research will begin soon at the lab’s above-ground facilities.

Neutrino Day was established to give children and other interested people a look at what they’re doing at the DUSEL and to spur their interest in science.

On Neutrino Day we saw a presentation about outer space, a neutrino experiment being conducted at the South Pole, and took a tour of the hoist room where massive cables are used to lift elevators up and down the long mine shaft.  Children got to create models of atomic elements with colored marshmallows and toothpicks, look at a real Geiger counter and test it against low-grade radioactive material, and do other science experiments. 

As the deep underground lab experiments start coming online, the Black Hills of South Dakota will become home to some very advanced science.