National lab directors, DOE, NSF visit Sanford Lab

LEAD, S.D. -- Scientists from four national laboratories -- including two national lab directors --  spent a day touring the Sanford Underground Laboratory at Homestake this week.
They were joined representatives from the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, which hosted a reception the evening before the tour.
The visitors included Dr. Pier Oddone, director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, and Dr. Samuel Aronson, director of Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York. Their tour Thursday included briefings, a surface tour and inspections of two "levels" -- one 2,450 feet underground and the other 4,550 feet underground.
South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds met with the scientists Wednesday at the reception.
"We welcome directors from other national laboratories as we continue to prepare our laboratory location," the Governor said later. "The coordination necessary to successfully deploy many experiments has already begun. The directors' presence in our state is evidence of their interest in coordinating activities involving more than one laboratory in several of the experiments."
South Dakota School of Mines President Robert Wharton joined the scientists on the tour.
"The School of Mines has longstanding connections to the Homestake Mine," President Wharton said.  "For nearly a decade we've helped champion the conversion of the mine into a national laboratory. Today, we are using our mining expertise and our unique knowledge of Homestake to transform North America’s deepest mine into a world-class laboratory to further exceptional research and discoveries not yet imagined"
The South Dakota Science and Technology Authority is reopening Homestake as the Sanford Laboratory, with experiments as deep as 4,850 feet underground.
The National Science Foundation is considering an even larger proposal to convert the Sanford Lab into a national laboratory -- a Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, or DUSEL -- with experiments all the way down to the  mine to the deepest level, which is- 8,000 feet underground. Deep labs protect sensitive instruments from cosmic radiation, and the NSF's DUSEL at Homestake would be the deepest lab in the world.
The Department of Energy also is considering Sanford Lab at Homestake as a site for a major experiment. Fermilab and Brookhaven are both DOE facilities.
Fermilab scientists are working on a proposal to aim a beam of neutrinos, produced in an accelerator at Fermilab, at a detector 4,850 feet underground at Homestake. Brookhaven National Laboratory would build the detector. Funding would come from DOE. Similar "long-baseline" neutrino experiments already are under way in Japan and Italy. Fermilab's current long-baseline experiment is a neutrino beam aimed at an underground detector at the Soudan Laboratory in northern Minnesota.
The Fermilab-Homestake beam would be the longest in the world -- 800 miles.
Neutrinos are elementary particles produced by radioactive decay. They travel at nearly the speed of light, and they are especially elusive because neutrinos have no charge and only the faintest whisp of mass. Trillions of solar neutrinos pass through our bodies each second, but they rarely hit anything. In fact, most neutrinos from the sun or other stars pass through the earth undetected.
Though they are slight, neutrinos are important to scientists' overall understanding of the universe. Particle accelerators allow scientists to control the energy and type of neutrinos in the beam. The long-baseline detectors at Homestake would be deep underground to screen out background noise from cosmic radiation. It would also be large. Very large. The long-baseline detector at Homestake would be a tank or a series of tanks containing several hundred thousand tons of purified water.