This award will provide funding to help support a three-day workshop at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (SDSMT) in Rapid City, South Dakota. This workshop will be held October 1-3, 2010 and is expected to provide an opportunity for both experimental and theoretical physicists to obtain an update on recent progress and exchange ideas in the field of underground science. The workshop will cover some of the most fundamental questions in high-energy physics, cosmology and astroparticle physics. It will bring together a total of about 60 experimentalists, theorists and young scholars who are working and seek to collaborate in several key areas such as non-baryonic dark matter, nucleon decay, long-baseline neutrino physics, neutrinoless double beta decay, etc.
The funding for PHY-1041890 through the National Science Foundation was used to host a workshop on the campus of South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, which is located in Rapid City, South Dakota. South Dakota School Of Mines and Technology is the major science and technology university in South Dakota and only 50 miles from the proposed US Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) at Homestake in Lead, South Dakota. As the Sanford Lab/DUSEL moves into its next design phase, several experimental projects are actively evolving in their design, research & development. These experiments target at the most fundamental problems in today's particle physics and cosmology, such as neutrino properties (the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment, the Majorana Experiment), dark matter (the Large Underground Xenon Experiment). The workshop brought together 52 experimentalists and theorists from six countries who are working and seek to collaborate in deep underground laboratory based experiments. Work by scientists and students in South Dakota was also introduced. The workshop reached a consensus that: (1) Dark matter, neutrino physics, and proton decay represent the most important directions in particle and astroparticle physics. Theoretical breakthroughs highly depend on the results from future experiments with high statistics and resolution. (2) A major underground lab in the US like DUSEL is needed for discoveries in these important fields and help maintaining the US leadership in fundamental research. Attentions should also be paid to results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). (3) In order to make discoveries, systematic efforts also need to be paid to data from accelerator physics, cosmogenic backgrounds, systematics in signal and background, and new event identification techniques. More information about the workshop (including all presentations) can be found at http://odessa.phy.sdsmt.edu/~bai/dusel.php
