Exploring An Underground Dark Matter Lab in 360°

Homam other words you are headed and choose their Canadian with our Canadian at a very Caitlin how so right now you might be wondering where we are we are two kilometers underground and another two kilometers down a mineshaft I'm going to a one of the deepest physics labs if you just laugh meet our world right yeah we're going to snow lab which is actually one of the deepest clean labs in the world so even though right now we're in an extremely dirty environment acid active copper and nickel mine when we get inside there is zero dirt zero anything because they're extremely sensitive particle physics experiments looking for Dark Matter neutrinos all kinds of the little building blocks that make up the universe so it's very hot and sticky down here yes I'm very hot right now so they will be in the lab yeah so Kate is the shooting a documented everything soon we also the news the our camera then went off so we're just going to bring a little field trip today and behind the scenes you've probably already seen that everyone was around you at all time but hopefully have fun and I hope you enjoy it because no one actually ever really get to come down here so the country's everything yeah public never gets the secret place so please join us see what's inside okay so at this point you've got to be wondering how is this where some of the most advanced particle physics research in the world takes place I mean looking at this serene and snowy landscape it's hard to imagine scientist working two kilometers below this very spot the particle physics work it's no lab focuses on extremely rare interactions that can't be detected above ground including neutrino research that won the Nobel Prize in 2015 and also helped explain how the Sun works so giggles they're wearing a different outfit now we just had to completely shower and throw all the dirt off and put on completely clean clothes because this is a clean room absolutely cleans our clothing is lint-free not everything we're wearing is completely spotless because no dirt is allowed in the slide that was ruined the experiment' so and also because we're in a tech physics lab as well as inside an active mind I mean we can have no cell phone and no wireless mic which is also we have Nathan over here is been hanging out with us and will be here with us today I need cell phone signals that I clicked enough detonations in the mind of care Jeff so we're trying to say one teacher today but the king you've been here before and you were so excited to get here and then we just walked in this room and behind us he's an enormous tank so this is a scientist friends it's a science being done right here right yeah and it's like one of the coolest kinds of science because what they're looking for is a particle that humankind understand exists these are the movement of stars and galaxies but we've never managed to detect it before that's dark matter it's kind of beautiful it makes up a quarter or so the matter in our universe we have no idea what it is so that's really amazing and there's Dark Matter searches all over the world but the one here at snow lab is one of the leading experiments in the world for dark matter so this is d 3600 and mini Queens are both using liquid argon as the detection element it's very cold inside at the thirty six hundred kilogram of liquid argon right in there which I'm really hoping that doesn't pop aside from experiments that have helped explain how the universe works the craziest thing about snow lab is that every single piece of equipment has to be hauled down the mineshaft either inside or hanging below the cage we took to the bottom that even includes all of the equipment for the Pico Dark Matter detection experiments which snow labs Ken Clark will show us now here we are this is a Dark Matter search of deep underground okay you're doing down here so this is the Pico experiment what we're doing is we're looking for dark matter which is going to interact inside our detector at the heart of our detector being this this setup right here so inside this setup we have our active fluid which we keep at a superheated state and so we're looking for particles come in interact and then we'll be able to see the interaction as it happens in there we have cameras monitoring this at all time do you happen so Dark Matter makes up like a quarter of our universe no one has ever found it that's right yeah a lot of people looking for it we're gonna fight it down here that's right hopefully somebody down here is going to find it I mean hopefully uh let's take a look around so what have we got like with all this stuff what is this what's in this room Oh in this room so this is obviously just a model of the detector but the real detector is in fact here what you can see is the giant water tank so that we use that because in addition to all the rock that seals out the cosmic rays and things coming in from the atmosphere we need to shield out things that happen in the walls of the of the cavern in here of the mine itself and so we put a water tank in there and that protects us from a lot of things that go on outside of it and so things quickly look like what's around back here sure yes so this is a cleanroom tent that was previously being used by the snow plus experiments they were cleaning one of their tools in here so it's all set up so that there's a positive pressure inside so that what happens is any dirt or anything that's in there gets pushed out and and isn't doesn't contaminate the instrument and I just want a true why do these experiments need to happen deep inside of mine would it be so much easier just to do them all above ground well the surface of the earth is constantly being bombarded by cosmic radiation and all those stray particles confuse the detectors burying these experiments under two kilometers of rock shields them from cosmic rays you can think of it as another way of keeping them clean we're standing on top of the snow plus detector right now although you can't see it from here it's basically a giant sphere full of liquid scintillator and while we visited it was in the process of being submerged in roughly 7,000 tons of ultra pure water which leaves no lab engineers are monitoring this space ran which is 30 meters high is the biggest man-made cavern misty underground anywhere in the world snow plus is looking for invisible ghost particles called neutrinos it's an upgrade from the original snow experiment which caught neutrinos from the Sun that work won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015 I'm going so so to win stars a about around 800 at designer is bigger at the end of their life they can't support the weight of the star with ujin anymore they run under fuel so star enters a star collapses and then trigger the huge explosion resistant the Illuminati you star at the encoding whom you like as bright as an entire galaxy but sanity no balls even bigger like around 100 times as much energy in the light so this the neutrino pulse comes out like like a few seconds but we can take when it happens we should be able to think that yeah and this effective here this supernova detector is called halo when a star explodes it releases a whole lot of energy and a tremendous burst of neutrinos halo is looking for these neutrinos which are like little messenger particles they could tell us a whole lot about supernovas in our galaxy the halo scientists could be waiting for the next supernova for a while though the last nearby one was detected in 1987 and there are only a couple supernovas in our galaxy every century well we get a signal from a supernova weekend do it soon enough I mean you're clear good chance yes they have about 300 entries we don't we don't know precisely because there's other experts but around that so yeah it could be any day or it could be for a while yet but yeah there's a lot of patience we have a carbon tax yeah well we're setting up so we're telling other detectors to essentially run itself in the next three days so yeah hopefully someday an email that we found something well I think we have to okay we're back from whence we came yeah how was that here it was really cool I lost my voice a little bit probably I was I was so excited in their assumption but yeah I'm tired like the pressure food raw dinner how do you feel I feel a little tired and that was a lot of worrying it's very much like a labyrinth in there so think of all these little caves and tunnels it's all open up yeah and every one of them is in same time Nathan geophone oh good right well so we're gonna get out of here we go without backup very much the service no two kilometers up yeah the most insane elevator I've ever do in my life yeah we have a walk ahead of us and all there right and then we finally get to take this stuff off all right we're going that way so I hope you had fun on our field trip today bye [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Motherboard

Views: 97,077

Keywords: motherboard, motherboardtv, vice, vice magazine, documentary, science, technology, 360, VR, virtual reality, underground laboratory, lab, laboratory, dark matter, physics, neutrinos, higgs boson, field trip, SNOLAB, snow, 360 degrees, google cardboard, samsung vr, oculus rift, playstation vr, htc vive

Id: Kdz5JDOMh5s

Length: 9min 58sec (598 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 03 2017