This award supports the education and public outreach program at the Soudan Mine Underground Laboratory, the country's only operational underground high energy particle physics and astrophysics facility. The Lab is hosted in a Minnesota state park, where each year approximately 4,000 of the Park's visitors venture 2,341 feet underground to see the facility, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) and Super- Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiments, and to learn about neutrinos and dark matter.
The Soudan Underground Mine is a historical site operated by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in an old iron mine in northern Minnesota. Around 28,000 people per year take the "historical" tour in the park, visiting the workings at the bottom of the half-mile deep mine. The Laboratory is also on that lowest level of the mine, where experiments benefit from the vast reduction in the cosmic ray background compared to the Earth's surface. These experiments are looking for individual interactions of weakly interacting particles such as neutrinos or proposed Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMP) dark matter candidates. The coincidence of an established education and outreach program, a top-notch research facility, and an unusual and impressive location provide a great opportunity to bring students and the general public into the lab where they learn about the often esoteric world of particle physics in an intriguing and accessible fashion.
