Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory

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The Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory (SUPL) is a laboratory under construction 1 km deep in the Stawell Goldmine, located in Stawell, Victoria, Australia. Of the two underground particle physics laboratories being proposed in the Southern Hemisphere, it is by far the most advanced.[1] It has close collaboration with the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy,[2] the largest such underground laboratory, and shall conduct research into dark matter and neutrinos.[3]

The first phase of the project received $1.75 million funding in the 2015 Australian federal budget. With matching funding from Victoria,[4] detailed design will proceed and construction will start in early 2016.[5][6]

Its Southern Hemisphere location has bearing on the possible differential detection of the putative WIMP-wind. Northern Hemisphere instruments are showing hints of a June "bump" of possible dark matter hits,[7] which is expected given the galaxy's rotation, but it is hard to be sure that it is not a false signal due to some subtle seasonal environmental effect. A Southern Hemisphere location, with opposite seasons, would be valuable confirmation. Secondly, the sundry particles (apparently from the constellation Cygnus)[8][9] would have travelled through the Earth itself before reaching SUPL's instruments.[10] Finally, its Southern Hemisphere location also makes it potentially very sensitive to daily variation effects which would be a smoking-gun for self-interacting dark matter or dark matter with a significant stopping rate.[11][12]

The first two experimentsl planned for SUPL are SABRE and DRIFT-CYGNUS.[13][14]

SABRE (Sodium-iodide with Active Background REjection), the more definite of the two proposals, is based on 50 kg of thallium-doped sodium iodide.[15][16] An improved version of the DAMA/LIBRA detector[17] already operating at at LNGS, two copies will be built:[15] one at LNGS and one at SUPL. Consistent results between the two will be very strong evidence.

DRIFT-CYGNUS is a directional dark matter detector based on the existing Directional Recoil Identification from Tracks detectors. The Stawell version is being organized by the CYGNUS (CosmoloGY with NUclear recoilS) consortium.[18]

References

  1. ↑ The other is the Agua Negra Deep Experiment Site (ANDES), trying to get funding to be added to the Agua Negra Pass highway tunnel just beginning construction. Because the tunnel itself will take many years to construct, the laboratory could not possibly begin operation before the early 2020s.
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External links

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