“When the people at SNOLAB said they were interested in contributing to this and then from our side the engineers and technicians said, ‘Yeah, we can do this,’ I was super excited because I really thought that this was coming together,” Tiffenberg said. She’s one of the SNOLAB employees who’ve taken on helping install projects remotely during the pandemic. “We will be their hands since they can’t be here,” Silvia Scorza, research scientist at SNOLAB, said of the perspective adopted for the project. This time, they’d be performing a weeks-long installation for an experiment they weren’t originally going to be a part of. SNOLAB staff are already familiar with the unique challenges of installing experiments in a clean lab located in a working mine. Without a way to get to the site, the SENSEI team reached out to SNOLAB to see if staff were open to installing the hyper-sensitive experiment themselves with remote guidance from Fermilab. Extraordinary teamwork between physicists on both sides of the border ensured that it moved forward on schedule.Īs the pandemic settled in for its third or fourth month, it dawned on Javier Tiffenberg, associate scientist at Fermilab and SENSEI collaborator, that the Fermilab team’s planned experimental installation, slated to begin in 2020, needed rethinking.

Instead, it’s in its commissioning phase - testing with about 20% of the target material the experiment will use when the outer layers of shielding are in place. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the closure of the U.S.-Canada border, the experiment could have easily fallen behind schedule in 2020. Now, the collaboration is running a bigger, exponentially quieter, more sensitive version of the experiment more than a mile underground at SNOLAB in Canada. The collaboration recently proved that the experiment has a sensitive dark matter detector and that it can reduce background rates in an underground experimental area at the Department of Energy’s Fermilab. The SENSEI collaboration uses skipper charged-couple devices, or CCDs, which are the most sensitive sensors of their kind, dreamt up decades ago and only recently realized.

In the search for dark matter particles, a tabletop experiment in the heart of a Canadian mine might do the trick. To get to SNOLAB’s cleanroom, where the SENSEI experiment is to be housed, a trip more than a mile underground inside a working mine, pictured here, is required.

The long dark badges