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

A glimpse into the future (and the past)

Submitted by Pranammya Dey, Yale University, Class of 2018

On our last day in the Chicago area, we went on a tour of Argonne National Laboratory. For me, this was the day I had been most looking forward to. Unlike most of my peers in the Davis-Bahcall program, I plan on majoring in chemistry rather than in physics or engineering. So while the previous labs had certainly been fascinating on an intellectual level, Argonne, with its broader spectrum of research, was right up my alley. As sky-high as my expectations inevitably were, Argonne surpassed my wildest dreams. I had expected cutting-edge research; I saw the future unfolding before my eyes.  

Cars engineered to charge wirelessly. Next-generation particle accelerators that increase the  maximum speeds possible with small tracks by orders of magnitude. X-ray beams powerful and precise enough to attract corporate and academic scientists from around the world. The diversity of research interests was simply astounding. 

Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) is open to the world. Scientists from virtually everywhere, Illinois and Italy, universities and companies, submit research proposals to use the APS, and Argonne allows the best of them set up labs and use the APS’s beam facilities. In fact, both the winners of the 2012 and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry used the APS in their research. The pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly has a lab at the APS, as does a collaborative project between Northwestern University in Evanston, Il and the chemicals companies DuPont and Dow. Argonne, therefore, is a prime example of the potential of public-private partnerships, and the dynamism possible when government projects work hand-in-hand with academia and industry. 

Our tour finished with a brief discussion of Argonne's incredible history. Starting just after the Second World War, Argonne's ambitious initial goal was to find a peaceful way to harness the incredible power within the atom, power that had previously only been used for destruction. As a part of President Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" project, Argonne pioneered the basic techniques used to produce electricity in nuclear power plants around the globe and in the heart of America's nuclear navy. With nuclear power currently providing around 20% of America's electricity and five new nuclear power plants under construction around the country, it's clear that Argonne more than accomplished its initial goal. 

Tomorrow we board our flight to Rome. Frascati Accelerator and Gran Sasso National Laboratory are only a few days away, and I couldn't be more excited. They'll have to be quite something to beat Argonne though. Personally, today was the best day of the program so far (except our loss to Belgium in the World Cup, that still hurts!).  

The Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab. Photo by Jack Storm