The coolest place in Sudbury most of us will never see

On the surface, Sudbury's SNOLAB is much like an iceberg. The tip only hints at the magnitude of what is found below.

“A lot of people in Sudbury don't actually know much about it, even though it's here,” said Clarence Virtue, a physics professor at Laurentian University who has conducted research in the underground laboratory since 1992. “We have no front door. We're on Vale property, so people can't just drop in and see us.”

A hidden treasure

The SNOLAB office, located at Vale's Creighton Mine, north of Lively, is a typical three-storey brick building, with a dark glass facade that gives it an air of modernity.

While not particularly imposing, it would not look out of place on most Canadian university campuses.

Because the office is located on Vale's private property, most people don't even get to see the building in person, outside of photos, or a low-resolution aerial view on Google Maps.

But to get to the heart of SNOLAB one must exit the main office and walk next door, to the Creighton Mine headframe, where a large cage takes you two kilometres underground.

As far as elevator rides go, it's a strange one, at least from the perspective of travelling companions. Entering the cage means finding your place in a crowded huddle of Vale miners in orange coveralls – Creighton is an operating nickel mine after all – and SNOLAB researchers, dressed much the same way.

One group plumbs the depths of the earth for useful minerals; the other plumbs the depths of universe for the secrets of reality itself.

It's somewhat ironic that to mine the mysteries of space, scientists must get as far away from the sky as possible.

The lab employs around 75 people, and 300 researchers from around the world are in and out to conduct their experiments.

After the miners lower the gate with a loud metallic creak, the cage rockets underground, descending at roughly 30 km/h, whooshing between periods of complete darkness and the yellow glow of the lighted mine drifts.

Like a secret lair

The ride ends at the 6,800-foot level of the mine, leaving around two kilometres of solid rock between hard-rock ceiling and the fresh air of the surface.

From there, the strange cage-fellows go their separate ways. The researchers — some of the best minds on the planet — must trudge 1.8 kilometres through dim drifts to reach the lab's entrance.

It's a jarring transition. The underground world of a mine is a grey, monotonous warren of tunnels, dripping and dingy and dirty. Carved out of Creighton's hard rock, SNOLAB wears the mine like a disguise. It's smooth and shiny, futuristic even.

And clean. There are few places on the planet cleaner than SNOLAB. Dust, dirt, grime: these are the enemies of the work being performed so far below the surface. The researchers take the battle seriously; it's a sacred duty.

To preserve the sterility of the enterprise, visitors undertake an elaborate cleaning process before entering the lab. Before passing through the first gate, visitors first wash the heavy rubber boots that took them through the drifts with high-pressure hoses, removing any dirt and mud.

First gate successfully passed, men and women head to separate change rooms, where they strip naked, shower and don clean, non-descript lab wear, likely worn by dozens of researchers before them. That done, it's into a blue jumpsuit, steel-toed shoes, hair net and hard hat.

Second gate cleared, you're not in Kansas anymore. Instead, it's a windowless office building with seamless white-plastic walls, buried more than 2,000 metres below the surface. It's like a James Bond villain's secret lair, but instead of plotting world domination, these scientists are after knowledge illumination.

A question of everything

Our guide, Clarence Virtue led us — a gaggle of media types — through winding white corridors to the location of the original Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, the groundbreaking experiment that recently earned its director, Arthur B. McDonald, the Nobel Prize for physics.

McDonald collects the most coveted prize in science at a ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, on Dec. 10.
It took researchers eight years, from 1990 to 1998, just to build the experiment, which eventually answered the “solar neutrino problem.”

When the experiment ran, from 1998 to 2006, they discovered subatomic particles produced in the sun's core, called neutrinos, had mass.

Why should we care if neutrinos have mass? Most of us don't have to. But if you're curious why everything in the universe looks like it does — from people to plants to planets — and if you wonder what reality itself is made out of, the building blocks of everything, then you care.

“Most people were convinced this was a no lose kind of project,” said Virtue, who helped build the original lab and conduct the early experiments. “No matter what we found, it was going to be big news.”

McDonald's resounding success meant the original SNO experiment expanded to SNOLAB, which has since become a world capital of sorts for the types of scientific experiments, the kind requiring the insulation from outside radiation and cosmic rays only two kilometres of solid rock can provide.

More prizes?

SNOLAB is a scientific labyrinth of winding corridors and cavernous rooms, hosting a dozen experiments that aim answer that big question: if matter is everything, what is matter made from?

With their teams of researchers in identical blue jumpsuits, shelves and tables holding advanced scientific instruments and tangles of multi-coloured cables, the James Bond villain's lair esthetic is plain, but the motives are far more benevolent.

Our guide, Virtue, is reusing many of the original SNO sensors to scan the galaxy for the massive bursts of neutrinos that only a supernova — an exploding star near the end of its life – can produce.

Other SNOLAB researchers are trying to observe the so-far unobservable: dark matter.

Although it sounds like something you would need a secret lair to find, researchers estimate dark matter is the most abundant form of matter in the universe, making up around 25 per cent of everything. Ordinary matter, like people and plants and planets, makes up a mere five per cent. Dark matter's cousin, dark energy, makes up the remaining 70 per cent, researchers think.

Despite its hypothetical abundance, dark matter has never been detected directly.

Laurentian physicist and SNOLAB researcher Jacques Farine believes a dark matter discovery would guarantee another Nobel Prize for the laboratory.

And with the success of the original experiment, and a Nobel Prize to its name, the laboratory continues to attract some of the brightest minds in physics anywhere.

The next great scientific breakthrough could very well come from a cavernous lab, located two kilometres below Sudbury.

Stayed tuned for more in this series of stories on SNOLAB, the coolest place in Sudbury most of us will never see.