The Boulby Mine Underground Science Facility: The Search for Dark Matter, and Beyond

Abstract

It is a remarkable fact that we do not know what the vast majority of the universe is made of. Everything we can see, planets, stars, galaxies, and gas, makes up just a tiny fraction of the matter in the universe. The rest, invisible to us, was dubbed “dark matter” by Fritz Zwicky, the maverick but brilliant astronomer, rocket scientist, and humanitarian, who inferred its existence when trying to reconcile the motions of galaxies with the laws of gravity [1]. More recent astronomical observations, probing the universe at many scales and wavelengths, point to the same conclusion [2]. Now, almost 80 years later, dark matter, and its partner dark energy, are the pervasive dogma of cosmology. At the other extreme of scale, another mystery is presented by the great variety of fundamental particles, for which we have little understanding of why such diversity exists. Theories of “physics beyond the standard model” may provide some of the answers. One of their most robust predictions is of a new fundamental particle [3], produced in abundance in the Big Bang, which will be hard, but not quite impossible, to detect. It is not surprising, therefore, that proof of the existence of these elusive particles, with the fundamental impact that discovery would bring to both physics and astronomy, has become one of the most prized of all goals in science. The science facility at Boulby Mine has been at the heart of this research for the last two decades.