I'm probably wrong,
But I thought gold mines has a certain amount of naturally occurring radiation due to the type of rock it hides in.
Edit: I Googled and they do. So won't this affect the instrumentation?
Australian physicists are looking at an unused gold mine in the Victorian town of Stawell to see if it's a suitable spot for a dark matter detector. As reported in the Wimmera Mail Times here, the Stawell Gold Mine Future Possibilities project has okayed the Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at Terascale (CoEPP) to …
see article on radon mention. Yep, radioactive gas. Like the K40, uranium, thorium and other elements prone to nuclear weak force instability that exist anywhere underground, despite GreenPieces (sic) insistence otherwise. I suspect some of the dark matter will be roo and wombat poo, judging by the droppings around my scrub patch. I wonder if they will also offset the change in neutrino irradiation that has been measured as the Earths orbital distance varies annually ?
That's alright, they're probably wrong about the entire existence of 'Dark Matter' anyway.
In any other field an invisible, all-pervasive space-bending fudge factor like that would be laughed at. Or worshipped... Still, at least all that time at the bottom of a minshaft would get you a bit of peace and quiet to work on Modified Newtonian Mechanics theory.
Naturally occurring radioactive material can be an issue, but levels in this particular mine are low. I took lots of radiation measurements there about 6 or 7 years ago and it's an excellent low background environment. Some of the old mines around Ballarat have very low levels of background radiation as well and would be suitable if this falls through.
"DAMA/LIBRA's 25 scintillators are made from thallium-doped sodium iodide in a five-by-five matrix, with two photomultipliers coupled to each crystal."
At this point I was poised to read about how they set up phase shift generators and ion drives, but alas no. No danger of creating a core breach or a temporal anomaly then, which is a relief.
It's always in the first place I look. Trouble is, I miss it, and then go looking everywhere else. Several hours later I've exhausted all other options and I go back to the first place I looked to discover it was there all along. This happens every time. You'd think I'd have learned by now! Fail icon is for me.
Unless we find a lost Star Trek warp core dumped into a passing wormhole ? Then we have fun with the wildlife. Especially if Jadzia Dax shows up. Anyway, the redbacks will love having a new hangout. Wombats can't dig thru rock so no cut Achilles tendons for the staff. Drop bears might take up residence at top of lift shaft.
for Science.
I am actually working on a neutrino detector at the moment, however mine will use a radioactive isotope as the detector and look for half life changes due to neutrino effect on B+ decay.
Would make sense, also relevant is that article suggesting that axions could be detected by their effect on Josephon junctions at <0.1K.
I guess the physicists don't want to travel too far from the Carlton coffee shops.
I remember many years ago there was a plan to put a gravitational wave detector in Western Australia, somewhere in the vicinity of the Gun Barrel Highway, so fairly remote. But all physics money went to Switzerland for so we could confirm the Standard Model and say "There is a Englert - um - Higgs Boson".
But with the resources bust, I think that there are a few large holes in the ground in remote areas with sufficient free infrastructure to support at team of scientists looking for dark matter.
An ant, or a stream of ants, crawling up a table leg to get to some spilled sugar, is unaware of the table, or even the concept of a table, or indeed of the concept of a universe in which tables, makers of tables and spillers of sugar do or could exist.
Physicists being somewhat more sophisticated than ants can measure and speculate about the universe as so far revealed to their understanding, but are still very much in the 'dark.'
Postulating a 'missing' 90 odd percent of the mass of our universe for which they are unable to account they come up with the 'dark matter' idea.
Could not this matter actually be the hardware on which the current simulacrum of a physical universe is running?
Dum bibo spero.