Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film

Image Cache: The following photos show a place that you might think serves as a supervillain’s lair at first glance. As a matter of fact, there are no dark schemes being plotted here here — only dark matter physics.

Browse through the cool photos, animations and diagrams in Gizmodo’s Image Cache here.

Unfortunately, unless you are a particle physicist living and working in Canada, you wouldn’t normally have the chance to visit the world’s second-deepest underground lab facility, known as SNOLAB. But thankfully, a photographer recently documented the scene 2km underground.

Here’s what the lab has to say about themselves:

SNOLAB is a world-class science facility located deep underground in the operational Vale Creighton nickel mine, near Sudbury, Ontario in Canada. The combination of great depth and cleanliness that SNOLAB affords allows extremely rare interactions and weak processes to be studied. The science program at SNOLAB is currently focused on sub-atomic physics, largely neutrino and dark matter physics…

At 2km, SNOLAB is the deepest clean room facility in the world.

This is quite a humble introduction. The lab doesn’t mention the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics that was awarded to Takaaki Kajita and SNO’s own Arthur B. McDonald for discovering that neutrinos can change from one type to another. The lab also claimed the 2016 Breakthrough Prize for its neutrino discovery.

Regardless, SNOLAB has hardly settled. After the original Sudbury Neutrino Observatory experiment ended, the facilities were expanded into a permanent underground laboratory, featuring a class-2000 cleanroom, with very low levels of dust and background radiation. This makes the lab perfect for experiments requiring high sensitivities and extremely low counting rates and could one day help these real-life sci-fi heroes detect dark matter. It also looks pretty badarse.


The SNOLAB Utility Area

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film


Detector device for the HALO experiment

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film


Installing the MiniCLEAN dark matter experiment

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film


Installing the DEAP-3600 dark matter detector

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film


The beautiful SNO+ chamber

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film

Working In This Lab Must Be Like Starring In A Sci-Fi Film


Photo Credit: SNOLAB


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.