Soudan

Submitted by Mattison Flakus, University of Rochester, Class of 2018

Mine

The Soudan mine itself differs from SURF in a variety of ways. This mine is open for public tours and requires a helmet, but no safety glasses, boots or coveralls. The science lab reaches 2341 feet below the surface. This twenty-seventh level is reached in two and a half minutes via a double decker cage that travels at ten miles per hour at a seventy-eight degree angle rather than straight down.

Origin

Soudan’s facility was a mine long before it was a science lab. It became a lab originally to search for knowledge about proton decay through the experiments Soudan I (twenty-third floor) and Soudan II (twenty-seventh). They used argon gas to fill the detector along with it being lined with tungsten wires wrapped in gold. Lucky for us, they did not find protons to be decaying!

MINOS

Soudan houses the impressively sized far detector that catches the neutrino beam sent through the earth from over 400 miles away at Fermilab. The octagonal detector contains 486 sheets of steel with a twenty-eight foot radius that spans 100 feet deep. Astonishingly enough, this detector was finished not only six months ahead of schedule, but also under budget, which we have learned is not a simple feat for a government funded project.

CDMS II

Soudan’s search for dark matter utilizes mind boggling temperatures. The silicon and germanium within the dark matter detector are cooled to -459.6 degrees Fahrenheit or .02 Kelvins. This temperature is even four degrees colder than the universe. This detector is surrounded by six tons of plastic and twelve tons of lead.The lead actually used to be part of a ship that sank in the Mediterranean Sea. Soudan’s workers removed it from the bottom of the sea during the night to protect it from cosmic ray exposure.

Heart

Soudan has unique features to be proud of. It was humbling to hear that the original proton decay detector was worked on by those with special needs. The breath-taking mural next to the minos detector adds beauty to the character filled lab. Best of all, they took us back in time to the mining days on our tour by serving us traditional pasties for lunch.

I speak for all of the Davis-Bahcall Scholars in saying that we thoroughly enjoyed our enlightening visit to the Soudan Science Laboratory.

The Minos neutrino detector. Photo by Dr. David Demuth