CETUP* celebrates 10 years of intellectual community building

Physicists who work at places like the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) can be broken into two broad categories—theorists and experimentalists. 

The theorists fill chalkboards with math based on data from experimental results. They use all of this to come up with new ideas for how the universe works.

The experimentalists also fill chalkboards with math, and they take the ideas from theorists to design and build experiments that test the theories. 

Theorists and experimentalists operate in symbiosis, each benefiting the other and both needed to survive. 

As one might expect, SURF employs and attracts lots of experimentalists—the kinds of scientists who are just as comfortable with a pipe wrench as they are with a partial differential equation. 

But early on, it was realized that theorists were also needed in the scientific community around SURF. Their creative ability to use the math and the data to imagine the possible is the fuel required to drive science forward. 

“So that was the original conversation. How can we bring those two groups of people together?” 

Barbara Szczerbinska is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. Shortly after SURF began its first scientific experiments, Szczerbinska met with Baha Balantekin, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for a conversation inside Balantekin’s office.  

“We did not want a conference in the traditional sense, when you have a lot of talks with very little time for the interactions,” Szczerbinska said. “We wanted to create a think tank that could bring all scientists together and build a community.”

Together, Szczerbinska and Balantekin came up with the idea of the Center for Theoretical Underground Physics * and Related Areas (CETUP*) workshop. 

“We ran our first program in 2011. It was just a pilot program,” said Szczerbinska. “I think it was like a three-week-long workshop with a very small group of scientists. And it was great. People were super excited. They loved the format of the meeting. We had a few talks a day—with lots of time in-between for conversations.” 

CETUP* continued each year until just before the pandemic, the workshop took a hiatus, and came back in 2023 due to popular demand.   

“You can do Zoom meetings, but they can’t replace in-person meetings where you sit together, have coffee, and discuss something at great length,” said Balantekin, who is known for his pioneering role in neutrino astrophysics alongside his work in nuclear physics, particle physics, and quantum information science. 

“You cannot do this kind of work in any other way. So, meetings like CETUP* are tremendously, tremendously important to really push physics to the next level,” Balantekin added. 

The collaboration and intellectual community built around CETUP* has established a track record of pushing physics to the next level. 

Over the years, CETUP* has produced more than 209 publications and become a hallmark of scientific exchange, contributing to major experiments at SURF, including the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), the largest physics experiment ever undertaken in the United States, and LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) the world’s leading dark matter detector—Louis Strigari credits this success to the scientific community built around CETUP*.  

“The success of CETUP* is measured by the fact that everyone keeps coming back every year, and we have like a really great core group of people,” Strigari said. 

Strigari is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, who has been involved in CETUP* since the first workshops. He notes that science often progresses incrementally—but sometimes, major breakthroughs lead to big advancements—and CETUP* is poised if this happens at SURF.   

“The community is kind of always like ready for the next big finding. Like maybe there's a dark matter signal that's detected at LZ at some point down the road. I think that's something that we'd all be ready for. I think this community can be very helpful in understanding and interpreting what's happening with any major findings that might come from SURF,” said Strigari.

Today, the workshop run by The Institute for Underground Science at SURF includes about 70 scientists who converge on the beautiful Black Hills town of Lead each summer—they tour the underground lab spaces, host lectures and discussions during the day, and are paired with mentorship and career-building opportunities for researchers. Learn more about The Institute for Underground Science at SURF in this video. 

CETUP* participants also engage in community events like the weekly Pub Talks during the evenings, and a student outreach component that helps inspire the next generation of researchers.  

“I think speaking to students who are part of your programs is so important. I've kept in contact with students from the last year who I'd really had good relationships with here on a mentoring front,” said Innes Bigaran, postdoc at Virginia Tech, will begin as an assistant professor of physics at the University of Tennessee in the fall. 

Bigaran is an early-career researcher in her second year of CETUP*. Bigaran says the students' interactions are so important because CETUP* has a real future at SURF. 

“I see the laboratory here at SURF, and the future of The Institute for Underground Science here, as being something very similar to what is happening at CERN. It's going to be really the center of a lot of the progress that we're going to be making in the coming years, and really, like I see the efforts that are going on to try and improve community outreach to improve science outreach and to really like build a center here that brings people together,” Bigaran said. 

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the workshop, and to look forward to the progress in the coming decade, CETUP* organizers at the Institute for Underground Science at SURF are putting together a time capsule—set to be opened in 2036. The effort is a fitting way to celebrate the first 10 years of advancing world-class science at America’s Underground Lab while connecting the intellectual community around CETUP* of today to the future generation of researchers at SURF.

The next CETUP* workshop will take place in June and July of 2027, in Lead, S.D. CETUP* and The Institute for Underground Science at SURF are funded thanks to generous donations provided through the SURF Foundation. To learn more or to donate to keep this kind of work moving forward, click here.