The School of Mines and Technology is hosting a conference to discuss research at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. The event started Friday, May 12, and continues to Tuesday, May 16.
This is the second conference of this sort. The first was held in 2015. Associate physics professor Richard Schnee chairs this year's conference organizing committee. He says holding the conference every two years seems to be the right timing.
"About two years ago, it wasn't totally clear whether DUNE was going to go forward, and now it really looks like it's going to go forward," Schnee says. "It's the biggest experiment in particle physics in the world. The LUX experiment was running two years ago. It's now finished. And the successor to it, LZ, is currently just beginning to be built up at Sanford Lab."
Schnee says about 120 participants are expected for this year's conference. He says most are from the United States, but many come from Canada and others from Germany, China, Korea, and Japan.
The Sanford Lab at Lead is home to high-level research projects conducted a mile underground. Among them is research into dark matter and the nature and origins of neutrinos.
An assistant physics professor says understanding neutrinos leads to better understanding of how the universe works.
SDPB's Victoria Wicks spoke with Luke Corwin at a conference at the School of Mines this weekend.