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The World's Largest Underground Laboratory Has Been a Success Story

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The World's Largest Underground Laboratory Has Been a Success Story FEATURE NEWS ENRICO SACCHETTI CHAMBER OF PHYSICS The world’s largest underground laboratory has been a success story for Italian science. But 30 years after construction began, its future is uncertain. he drive along Italy’s highway BY NICOLA NOSENGO constantly bombarding Earth’s surface from A24 from the central Adriatic space. This lack of cosmic interference has coast towards Rome begins with a winding climb into the attracted a generation of physicists to these halls, where they can study T snow-covered Apennine Mountains, followed by a plunge some of the rarest and most elusive phenomena in the Universe. into the 10-kilometre-long tunnel under Gran Sasso, the Most people probably first heard of Gran Sasso last September, when highest peak in the region. About half way through the tunnel, a detour its OPERA experiment reported — incorrectly, as it turned out — that leads off to the right. It reaches a dead end almost immediately at a heavy neutrinos seemed to travel faster than light. But the laboratory, construc- iron gate. But press the intercom button and utter the words ‘particle tion of which began 30 years ago, has long been known to physicists. physicist’ into the microphone, and the gate slides open like something Gran Sasso “was the first true underground laboratory, the only one from a James Bond movie. purposely built for science”, says Stanley Wojcicki, a physicist at Stanford Not far beyond the gate is a car park. From there one continues on University in Palo Alto, California. It is still by far the largest, serving as foot, and begins to get some idea of the scale of the infrastructure hidden a base for 18 experiments and about 950 researchers from 32 countries. beneath the mountain. Opening off a long corridor are three huge halls, “Gran Sasso’s halls have allowed experiments based on different each about 20 metres wide, 18 metres high and 100 metres long. This technologies to work side by side, compar- vast area is the home of the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, part of the ing each other’s pros and cons, and building Gran Sasso’s Large Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN). multiple generations of the same experiments,” Volume Detector In fact, the laboratory’s 180,000 cubic metres of space is not its most says Kevin Lesko, a neutrino physicist at the (LVD) searches for valuable attribute. Lying under 1,400 metres of rock, it offers silence — Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in neutrino bursts from not an absence of sound, but of cosmic-ray noise, the rain of particles Berkeley, California. The result has been some supernovae. 24 MAY 2012 | VOL 485 | NATURE | 435 © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved NEWS FEATURE THE A, B AND C OF GRAN SASSO Experiments at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory are housed in and Gran Sasso around three huge halls carved deep inside the mountain, where they Gran Sasso are shielded from cosmic rays by 1,400 metres of rock. National Laboratory CRESST GERDA XENON 1,400 m DarkSide CUORE LVD DAMA ICARUS Borexino Laboratory OPERA Rome HALL A Adriatic coast HALL B CERN HALL C NATURE.COM For an interactive version of this graphic go to: go.nature.com/octm2n long-standing underground rivalries. But they have helped to make particles with a half-life many times longer than the age of the Universe. Gran Sasso one of Italy’s strongest scientific success stories, responsible The only hope of seeing such a rare event was to monitor a huge amount for a string of notable results in neutrino and solar physics. “It is our of matter for a long time, while shielding it from any background radia- trading currency with the international physics community” says INFN tion that might swamp the signal. president Fernando Ferroni. All the project needed was a gigantic cavern in a mountain. Zichichi At the age of 30, however, Gran Sasso finds itself in transition. Its found it at Gran Sasso, 120 kilometres from Rome, where a highway tun- scientific priorities are changing, and a long collaboration with CERN, nel under the mountain had been started and then abandoned for eco- Europe’s premier particle-physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland, nomic and political reasons. “The shape of the mountain was ideal”, he is nearing its end. Budget cuts are making it harder to keep Gran Sasso recalls. “Gran Sasso is flat, so the thickness of the shield remains constant running. International competition is increasing, thanks to proposals along its length.” INFN physicists measured cosmic rays in the gallery, to put in new detectors at other facilities such as SNOLAB near Sud- and found that their flux was about one million times lower than at the bury in Canada, Japan’s Kamioka laboratory and the Soudan laboratory surface. Radioactivity measurements were also encouraging, one thou- in Minnesota, as well as the proposed Deep Underground Science and sand times lower than on the ground. Gran Sasso’s dolomite rock is very Engineering Laboratory at the Homestake gold mine in South Dakota. poor in uranium and thorium, the main sources of natural radioactivity. And although many of its experiments have had important results, Gran A mountain with the ideal physical properties, already containing a Sasso is still waiting for its first big discovery: a groundbreaking finding tunnel but devoid of traffic — “it seemed too good to be true”, says Zichi- that would match its size and the ambitions that spawned its creation. chi. Had they had to build the laboratory from scratch, he says, it would have cost too much. As it was, its estimated price tag came to 77 billion THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING NEUTRINOS Italian lire, roughly equal to US$160 million today. When Gran Sasso was first conceived in the late 1970s, one of the key Zichichi presented the project to the Italian Parliament in 1979. It was motivations was political. Antonino Zichichi, who proposed and over- approved in February 1982 — a decision had also been made to com- saw the project as president of the INFN, admits he wanted to give Italy plete the abandoned highway — and construction began in September. something that would increase its weight in the international physics In 1987, the halls were ready for the installation of the first experiments. community and counterbalance CERN’s role in European physics. Building a scientific community took longer. “For a long time, Gran But there were also two solid scientific drivers. The first was the case Sasso was mostly a training camp for underground physics,” says Fer- of the ‘missing’ neutrinos. Since the late 1960s, US physicist Raymond roni — an entirely different endeavour from particle accelerator phys- Davis had been running an experiment in Homestake to detect neutri- ics, which was where most of the physicists coming to work in Gran nos created in nuclear reactions at the core of the Sun. He found only Sasso had learned their craft. Rather than smashing particles against about one-third of the number predicted by theory. Other physicists each other and seeing what happens, underground physicists spend their had suggested a solution: if neutrinos ‘oscillate’ as they travel in space, days painstakingly selecting and testing materials for use as shields and spontaneously transforming from one of their three types to another, detectors, weeding out every conceivable source of background noise, they would be so thoroughly mixed by the time they arrived at Earth that and analysing months and months of data — only to find that, nine times only about one-third would still be the type that Davis’s detector could out of ten, a ‘signal’ is just background noise that somehow got through. pick up. But because neutrinos interact so weakly with other particles, The first-generation of experiments established what could and could testing that idea would require a detector shielded from cosmic rays by not be done with underground detectors. Neutrino physics proved espe- hundreds of metres of rock. cially fruitful: one of Gran Sasso’s most notable early experiments was The other problem was proton decay. Various efforts to build ‘grand Gallex, which ran from 1991 to 1997 and provided confirmation that unified theories’ of particle interactions suggested that the proton Davis’s absent solar neutrinos really were missing1. But the effort to was ever so slightly unstable, and would decay into lighter subatomic measure proton decay was quickly abandoned. “Early theories were 436 | NATURE | VOL 485 | 24 MAY 2012 © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved FEATURE NEWS OPERA, ENRICO SACCHETTI; BOREXINO, VOLKER STEGER/SPL; ICARUS, ENRICO SACCHETTI STEGER/SPL; BOREXINO, VOLKER OPERA, ENRICO SACCHETTI; At Gran Sasso, neutrinos are under intense scrutiny, with the OPERA (left), Borexino (top right) and ICARUS experiments all focused on their detection. too naive,” says Ferroni. “Seeing a proton decay would require one mil- Right beside Borexino is the now famous OPERA experiment: a detec- lion tonnes of water, or more than 10,000 tonnes of liquid argon. We tor the height of a three-storey building made of about 150,000 ‘bricks’ of lack the technology, the laboratory, the money.” Also shot down was photographic film separated by lead plates. Since 2008, OPERA has been the quest for magnetic monopoles: theoretical particles with just one looking for oscillations in a beam of neutrinos fired from CERN, some magnetic pole, which were the subject of Gran Sasso’s first major experi- 730 kilometres away. The beam comprises only muon neutrinos, and ment, a primarily Italian–US collaboration called MACRO. Researchers the idea is to look for tau neutrinos at the Gran Sasso end, which would searched for the particles between 1989 and 2000, but never caught a prove that they have switched from one type, or ‘flavour’, to another dur- glimpse of them2.
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