LEAD | Cobbled together on a shoestring budget with some parts purchased on eBay, the most sophisticated dark matter detector ever assembled operated for four years nearly a mile beneath the Earth’s surface at the Sanford Underground Research Facility.
On Tuesday night, the titanium vessel and inner chamber of the Large Underground Xenon dark matter detector — commonly referred to as LUX by scientists associated with the experiment — found a new home with its unveiling in the sunlight of the Sanford Lab Homestake Visitor Center perched on the edge of Lead’s massive Open Cut.
The new exhibit provides visitors with tangible evidence of the ongoing hunt for WIMPs — weakly interacting massive particles — that has engaged hundreds of nuclear physicists and other scientists from institutions scattered around the world.
In 2016, the experiment was decommissioned and dismantled. Its 6-foot-tall, 1,000-pound titanium vessel and inner chamber, which once held xenon, could have been destined for the junk pile, cut up for Christmas ornaments or, as one former Homestake miner suggested, converted into a smoker, according to Simon Fiorucci, a scientist from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who helped lead the experiment.
“I can’t believe we didn’t see this exhibit from the start,” said Tom Shutt, another LUX scientist from the SLAC National Accelerator Lab at Stanford University. “There really aren’t exhibits like this anywhere except at hard-core scientific institutions, so this is pretty cool.”
More than 100 other scientists and interested individuals who attended Tuesday’s unveiling seemed to agree, crowding around the impressive exhibit. It includes a photomultiplier tube used to detect light and a large touch-screen kiosk exploring aspects of the groundbreaking experiment intended to help solve some of the most enduring mysteries of the universe.
“We’ve been telling people about this underground experiment while it’s been running for four years,” said Sanford Lab Executive Director Mike Headley. “Now we can actually show them the LUX.
“It’s amazing to have the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector on display, where kids can see it up close and get enthused about math and science,” Headley added. “And, of course, there’s no place to trade in a dark matter detector.”
On Friday, the Sanford Lab and Fermilab will officially break ground on the collaborative Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment — known as DUNE — a billion-dollar experiment involving nearly 1,000 scientists from 163 institutions in 31 nations. DUNE’s detector will be 1,000 times more sensitive than that of the LUX, scientists say.
