By Mark Hanhardt, experiment support scientist
As an experiment support scientist with the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), I work in a unique environment to support the various experiments we have throughout our entire underground campus. I have a distinctive job because I don’t work on just one project, but rather on many projects helping out where I am needed. The job can be busy, sometimes overwhelming, but it’s never boring. Follow me through a typical day working nearly a mile underground at SURF.
Pulling into the lab parking lot this morning, I get to briefly watch the sunrise before I head inside. The lab, situated in the gorgeous town of Lead, SD, surrounded by the Black Hills, is at the top of one of the tallest hills in town, which offers a great view of the surrounding area.
At the Ross Campus I conduct a little training for a new researcher on how to safely handle lead bricks. Don’t eat the lead bricks, don’t lick the lead bricks, don’t speak in harsh tones to the lead bricks, etc. We come a mile underground to conduct extremely sensitive experiments because the rock blocks out much of the noisy cosmic radiation that bombards the earth. We use lead bricks to further shield the experiments from radiation from local sources including the rock and concrete underground, the signals created by the various electronic equipment used in the experiments and radioactive researchers—the human body puts out enough radiation on its own that it could overwhelm or even ruin some of our underground experiments.
After leaving CASPAR, I walk roughly 1 km back to the other major science campus on the 4850L, the Davis Campus, which is named for Ray Davis Jr, a chemist from Brookhaven National Laboratory. Davis conducted the Homestake Solar Neutrino Experiment, detecting neutrinos from the sun for the first time in the 1960’s-1980’s. His work introduced the world to the Solar Neutrino Problem, which puzzled physicists for many years, but resulted in a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics when two other underground laboratories discovered that neutrinos come in three flavors. His work was conducted in the same space underground that is used for experiments looking for dark matter.
SIGMA-V wins the prize for “Experiment Most Resembling a James Bond Villain Lair.”
My trip takes me down the West Drift, so I am able to check on the SIGMA-V equipment. SIGMA-V is an experiment being conducted to help understand processes that can be used to improve the efficiency and feasibility of geothermal energy production. In contrast to most of the drifts underground, this area is well lit to help the researchers on that project work quickly and safely.
The area beyond SIGMA-V, however, is not lighted. Aside from the line of overhead reflectors indicating my primary escape route in case of an emergency, there’s not much to capture on camera. I have to use my cap lamp to see where I’m going as I hike the remainder of the way to the Davis Campus. This area is quiet and it can be very peaceful to walk through alone—my monastery a mile underground.
The other experiment, the Majorana Demonstrator, aiding in the search for neutrinoless double-beta decay, is currently running and is very sensitive to any outside contaminant. Researchers working directly on Majorana must go through a second, even more stringent set of cleanliness protocols—they wear a hair net, booties over their lab shoes, two pairs of nitrile gloves, a Tyvek suit, a hood, a face mask, another pair of booties that clip into the suit, and tape around the gloves at the sleeve. (When I have helped out in Majorana, it is usually at this point that I realize I need to use the restroom.) Onced garbed up in this fashion, researchers can enter the detector room where they must discard their topmost pair of nitrile gloves and put on a new pair.
But I’m looking forward to getting back to it tomorrow because, as we say at Sanford Lab, "It’s always sunny on the 4850."