Searching for the universe’s secrets [at Creighton Mine] – by Rita Poliakov (Sudbury Star – May 19, 2012)

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

Tony Noble thrives underground. Two kilometres beneath the Earth’s surface, he strides from cavern to cavern, stopping to show off a lack of piping or a water chamber or a tall, thin device filled with liquid.

“It’s like a giant coffee percolator,” he says. “The water comes in at the top and falls down, allowing gas to diffuse out of the surface. Any gas in the water is stripped out. We’re worried about radon.”

Radon, it seems, is only the beginning of his concerns. Noble and his fellow scientists fervently try to avoid radioactivity. Everything in the underground lab is designed to reduce it. The floors are made of acrylic, the walls are

smoothed down so they’re easy to clean and all personnel are required to shower and change before entering. The facility is the deepest and cleanest underground lab of its kind in the world, meaning it has about 100 million times less radioactivity than what’s typically found above ground. “Any radioactivity is a problem for us,” Noble says.

This is because Noble is showing off SNOLAB, a 5,000- square-foot facility where the secrets of the universe are examined and broken down. The lab was built deep in Vale’s Creighton Mine and has received around $70 million in funding. Much of the lab’s money comes from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and provincial funding, which includes Ontario Innovation trust, the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund and FEDNOR. The City of Greater Sudbury provided the lab with a five-year grant for public education, as well.

Experiments in the lab focus on finding and studying neutrinos and the ever-elusive dark matter, which no one has ever seen. SNOLAB is an expansion of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), which has a history that dates back to the 1980s. In 1984, scientists proposed building the observatory — a 10-storey sphere filled with heavy water that would detect neutrinos.

The experiment ran from 1999 to 2006 and changed the way scientists viewed the world. It was SNO that provided some of the first conclusive evidence that neutrinos have mass. The project’s success led to the facility’s expansion into what is now called SNOLAB. The lab, which celebrated its grand opening on Thursday, has been expanding since 2004. It now includes a handful of national and international experiments, some of which are currently collecting data while others are scheduled to start collecting data in the near future.

According to Samantha Kuula, SNOLAB’s communications officer, the merit of pure research is clear. It can even be quantified.

“We know for every dollar the province has invested, there’s been a $6 return in the community,” Kuula said, explaining that this return includes creating local jobs.

For the rest of this article, please go to the Sudbury Star website: http://www.thesudburystar.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3566710