Homestake chosen as site of underground laboratory

NSF has made an award to a team headed by Kevin Lesko of the University of California at Berkeley to develop a technical design for a Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, or DUSEL. Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced selection of a University of California-Berkeley proposal to produce a technical design for a Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) at the former Homestake gold mine near Lead, S.D. The Homestake team, headed by Kevin Lesko, could receive up to $5 million per year for up to three years.

A 22-member panel of external experts, all screened for conflicts of interest, exhaustively merit-reviewed proposals from four teams and unanimously determined that the Homestake proposal offered the greatest potential for developing a DUSEL, and NSF concurred with the panel's recommendation. The agency's selection of the Homestake proposal provides funding only for design work. Any decision to construct and operate a DUSEL would entail a sequence of approvals by NSF and the National Science Board; funding would then have to be requested by the Administration and approved by Congress.

"We are excited about the opportunities in underground research and education that a DUSEL would provide and look forward to working with all of the research communities to develop a well-conceived plan for this unique, world-leading facility at the Homestake Mine," said Tony Chan, assistant director for the NSF Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. "In tandem with the design of the facility infrastructure, NSF also will begin working with researchers to identify the initial suite of experiments that might be deployed in DUSEL."

Over the past decade, a dozen "blue-ribbon" independent reports from the National Academies and multiagency government committees have emphasized the need for a DUSEL, and various candidate sites have been discussed. In September 2006, NSF solicited proposals to produce technical designs for a DUSEL at one specific site. By the January 2007 deadline, four teams, each focusing on a different location, had submitted proposals.

The review panel included outside experts from relevant science and engineering communities and from supporting fields such as human and environmental safety, underground construction and operations, large project management, and education and outreach. Scientists from Japan, Italy, the United Kingdom and Canada also served on the panel. The review process included site visits by panelists to all four locations, and two meetings to review the information, debate and vote on which--if any--of the proposals would be recommended for funding.

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From Interactions.org,
July 9, 2007

10,000 ton ALICE gets her UK-built 'Brain'

As construction of the World's largest machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva (Switzerland), gears up for completion next year, the four main experiments, that will study different aspects of the resulting high-energy particle collisions, are also gearing up. For one such experiment, called ALICE, this process got a step closer last week when a crucial part of the 10,000-ton detector, the British-built Central Trigger Processor (CTP), was installed in the ALICE cavern, some 150 feet underground.

"The CTP is essentially the electronic brain of the whole ALICE experiment", says Dr David Evans of the University of Birmingham, "it can receive up to 60 input signals from various sub-detectors and sensors every 25ns (25 billionths of a second) and make complex decisions in less than 100ns (a tenth of a millionth of a second). The CTP decides if an interesting particle collision has taken place and tells the many sub-detectors of ALICE whether to collect the data or not."

The ALICE experiment will probe the mysteries surrounding the structure of matter. Head-on collisions of lead nuclei at the LHC will create sub-atomic sized fireballs with huge temperatures and densities and recreate the conditions that existed less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang.

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