A small town in regional Victoria called Stawell will soon have a secret deep below its main street. One thousand metres underground in a dusty, dark gold mine will sit a brand-new, dust-free, laboratory with a dark matter detector at its core.
If you’re a physicist who needs to head down there for work, the trip isn’t easy. For openers you’ll need to don 10kg of protective mining equipment and drive in a specialised ute down a tunnel for 45 minutes in the dark on the bumpiest road imaginable. Then you’ll have to strip and shower off all the dirt and grime acquired on the way. Finally, after changing into a fresh, low-dust jumpsuit, you’re ready to enter the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory (SUPL).
“I was overwhelmed when I went down that tunnel,” says Professor Alan Duffy, Swinburne University of Technology astrophysicist and former lead scientist of the Royal Institution of Australia. “It was a 45-minute journey to see this huge facility. The roof was over 12 metres high. It’s such a larger space than I imagined, but clearly so full of promise.”
At this depth, the smell is completely foreign. Breathable air is pumped throughout the facility, but by the time it reaches a kilometre below the surface it’s hot and humid and rank. To Wayne Chapman, one of the managers of the SUPL building project, it’s the smell of decades of “miners, sweat, kebabs, beer and blast fumes”.
Right now, the lab – a cavernous area on a mostly unused section of the mine – is just a construction site. But if all goes to plan, by the end of 2022 a team
