Sanford Underground Research Facility

Contributed by Noah Watkins, Augustana College, Class of 2018

To whom it may concern,

My name is Noah Watkins and I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that the moment I read my acceptance letter into the Davis-Bahcall program was one of the happiest moments of my young life. This has been a dream come true as far as experience in today’s math and physical science related career paths are concerned. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Our trip as Davis-Bahcall Scholars started out in the Black Hills of South Dakota. There we stayed at Black Hills State University and regularly traveled to Homestake Mine in Lead, SD. There we learned about modern particle physics. This is a rapidly developing field of physics that captivates the minds of many brilliant scientists around the world. As someone who plans on studying physics at college it was interesting to see what opportunities lie ahead of me. After covering the basics of the field such as the Standard Model and prevailing theories on the expansion, and by extent fate, of the universe, we put our focus on muons and dark matter. We spent a lot of time looking at what they are, how they interact with the world around us and the different ways one can detect these elusive miniscule particles. While both present their own conundrums of observation, ultimately muons are proven and have established methods of detection while our theories on the predicted dark matter remain undetected and therefore unproven. To wrap up our understanding of particle detectors, we set up muon detectors on the surface as well as at 4850 feet underground in the mine, and observed the Lux experiment also set up on the 4850 level designed to detect dark matter. Pictured below is our leader Dr. Norris in the blue helmet and the ten Davis-Bahcall Scholars heading down the shaft to the 4850 level. I will never forget that trip into the mine not only because we were almost a mile below the surface, of the Earth, but because of the cutting edge physics taking place there.

Heading down the shaft at Sanford Underground Research Facility. Picture by Deirdre Peck.