(Continued from page 23)

easier walking, and clean rooms ensure that the experiments won't be tainted.
• Now the site's ideal, said Kevin Lesko, of Lawrence Berkley National Lab, who is the principal investigator for the Sanford Underground Research Facility. Dark matter is too sensitive to detect in normal laboratories, but one so far underground would help shield it from pesky cosmic radiation. Also, the LUX detector is submerged in water, further insulating it.
• The unveiling was a long time coming: The

mine opened during the Black Hills' gold rush in 1876 and outlasted many counterparts. In the late 1990s, it employed about 1,000 people, but as the value of gold dropped, hundreds of miners gradually lost their jobs. The mine shuttered for good in 2003.
• The science community seized on the closure for its lab potential. Gaitskell said he's worked with 70 scientists and 14 institutions over the past four years to make the LUX experiment a reality.
• That detector is in the Davis Campus, named after Ray Davis, who won a Nobel Prize for Physics for an experiment he started in 1965 inside the then-working mine. Davis died six years ago; his widow, Anna Davis, brought a replica of her husband's prize to Wednesday's unveiling.
• Nearby in a new hall called the Transition Area will be the Majorana Demonstrator Experiment. That's aimed to search for a rare form of radioactive decay, which could help physicists understand how the universe evolved.
• Experiments are set to begin this year, said Bill Harlan, spokesman for the re

(Continued on page 25)