Underground lab works on anti-matter
Scientists are building a 40-kg germanium detector, 4,850 feet beneath the earth’s surface in a laboratory in the US, to help explain the puzzling imbalance between matter and antimatter generated by the Big Bang.
The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has begun delivery of germanium-76 detectors to the underground laboratory in South Dakota with the intention of building the germanium detector, capable of detecting the theorised neutrinoless double beta decay.
The detection might help to explain the matter-antimatter imbalance.
“It might explain why we’re here at all. It could help explain why the matter that we are made of exists,” said David Radford, who oversees specific ORNL activities in the Majorana Demonstrator research effort.
Radford, a researcher, has been delivering germanium-76 to Sanford Underground Research Laboratory (SURF) in Lead, South Dakota, for the project.
After navigating a Valentine’s Day blizzard on the first two-day drive from Oak Ridge, Radford made a second delivery in March. Before the detection of the unobserved decay can begin, however, the germanium must first be processed, refined and enriched.
The 42.5-kg of 86 per cent enriched white germanium oxide powder required for the project is valued at $4 million and was transported from a Russian enrichment facility to a secure underground ORNL facility in a specially designed container.
The container’s special shielding and underground storage limited exposure of the germanium to cosmic rays.
Without such preventative measures, Radford said, “Cosmic rays transmute germanium atoms into long-lived radioactive atoms, at the rate of about two atoms per day per kg of germanium.”
“Even those two atoms a day will add to the background in our experiment. So we use underground storage to reduce the exposure to cosmic rays,” he said.
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