Discovering Science: Underground Neutrinos Lab at Soudan Mine

Investigating Fundamental Particles: Neutrinos

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It’s the oldest and deepest underground mine in Minnesota and it is fair to say it’s in our backyard: Tower-Soudan.

The mined closed for operation in the 1960’s but has since flourished into an educational mecca.

The underground mine houses a laboratory that is taking a closer look at what makes up our universe.

Neutrinos are the second most common particle in the universe.

They have no charge and very little mass so they are hard to catch and can fly through anything.

2,341 feet below the surface sits an underground lab.

“Everything you see down here came down the same shaft the miners blasted out in the 1920’s,” said Mine Interpreter James Juip.

In simplistic terms, it is a lab of physic experiments.

“We’re talking about the tiny things that make up everything around us, the very basic things and without doing basic research on these tiny things called neutrinos we really are missing out on a part of our whole universe,” said Juip.

In Chicago, a lab is busy sending a constant beam of neutrinos.

“Fermilab they are making a beam of neutrinos and aiming it up towards us and it travels under Wisconsin,” said project coordinator, UMD Physics and Astronomy Alec Habig.

Twenty to thirty trillion neutrinos are fired every second or two.

“They travel 735–kilometers, 500 miles to get here. The big thing in the background is the MINOS detector and we measure them again here or rather we measure the few that are so unlucky to actually hit our detector head–on,” said Habig.

The detector is made up of 6,000-tons of steel and plastic.

In more than a decade of research not many neutrinos have been detected by the machine.

“A few thousand and that is running for 15–years for 9–10 months out of the year as close to 24/7 as we can run,” said Habig.

Usually, they continue on their beam, flying through the machine and back into the universe.

 It means any and all captured neutrinos are pivotal to learning about how the universe behaves.

The research will be complete next summer at Soudan.

In the meantime you can call and schedule a tour. 

To watch a display of the live neutrino data: http://farweb.minos-soudan.org/events/LiveEvent.html