Two kilometres beneath the Earth’s surface in a mine near Sudbury, Ont., scientists are searching for the enigmatic dark matter that constitutes 80 per cent of the material in the universe.

The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or SuperCDMS, is located in SNOLAB, one of the world’s deepest scientific laboratory. The experiment is being conducted by an international collaboration formed over ten years ago that includes physicists from the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Department of Physics.

“It's really fun going down into the mine to the lab,” says Madeleine Zurowski, a postdoctoral fellow in the department and a member of the group building the SuperCDMS detector. “It's definitely not a place I thought I'd find myself when I started studying physics — but it's really cool.”

The U of T team includes Zurowski, along with SuperCDMS co-principal investigators Professors Miriam Diamond, Ziqing Hong and Pekka Sinervo. Diamond works on computer simulations which predict what a detection will look like; Hong heads the team building the experiment’s cryogenic components; and Sinervo focuses on organizing the underground work, statistical modelling and data analysis. The team is rounded out by another four postdoctoral fellows and ten graduate students.

More information here: https://www.artsci.utoronto.ca/news/physicists-delve-deep-beneath-earth-s-surface-search-dark-matter