Four months after choosing the disused Homestake gold mine in South Dakota as the site for the proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (see Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 60 8 2007 34 https://doi.org/doi:10.1063/1.2774095 August 2007, page 34 ), NSF convened a “town meeting” in Washington, DC, in November to introduce a broad range of prospective DUSEL users to the facility’s site-specific conceptual design and its scientific potential. For experiments in nuclear, particle, and astrophysics, the primary attraction of laboratory space deep underground is the reduction—by many orders of magnitude—of the inescapable flux of cosmic-ray muons that can swamp delicate signals.
Led by Kevin Lesko (University of California, Berkeley), the team that championed the Homestake proposal has now been funded for the next three years to prepare a detailed engineering design for DUSEL. That effort must, of course, take account of the first group of major experiments that...
