Deeper Talks: SURF Seminar Series
The Institute and SURF is proud of its researcher community and this series aims to strengthen the sense of intellectual community. It provides a platform for researchers to discuss their work, share insights, and foster interdisciplinary connections.
Upcoming Talks
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September 10, 2025
Topic: CUSSP Experiment (register here)
Speaker: Dr. Kevin Rosso of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) hold great promise as a new and widespread source of clean baseload power. The approach relies on modern drilling technology to create an artificial reservoir at depth in hot, dense rock by inducing a fracture network through which cold water can be injected and hot water returned to the surface. Maintaining heat production from EGS reservoirs for years would benefit from improvements in 1) simulations that accurately reflect how fluid pressures, stress, and mineral dissolution/precipitation reactions in hot stressed rock combine to alter flow pathways over time, and 2) new geophysical sensing tools that can remotely detect those changes in real-time.
This talk will highlight how a multidisciplinary team is tackling this need through the Center for Understanding Subsurface Signals and Permeability (CUSSP), supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. CUSSP integrates a highly instrumented field-scale EGS testbed at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) with core-to-microscale laboratory experiments designed to inform multi-continuum reactive flow simulations. The central objective is to demonstrate the ability to connect real-time multi-physics sensing signals to the underlying thermal-hydrological-mechanical-chemical (THMC) processes affecting the properties of the fracture network. This talk will also summarize some of the key fundamental challenges at this frontier where chemistry, rock mechanics, and sensing technologies intersect, and our research approach to make meaningful progress.
October 8, 2025
Topic: Homestake to SURF: (1) The Early Days, (2) Thinking Beyond DUNE (register here)
Speaker: Dr. Jose Alonso Laboratory Director Emeritus, Sanford Underground Lab
Abstract to follow.
November 12, 2025
Topic: Under the Canadian Shield: Science Now and in the Future at SNOLAB (register here)
Speaker: Dr. Stephen (Steve) Sekula of SNOLAB
SNOLAB is the world's deepest-cleanest laboratory, a 5000 square-meter, class-2000 (or better) cleanroom science facility located 6800 feet under the dense Canadian shield in an active nickel mine in Greater Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. This talk will review SNOLAB's science portfolio, a cross-cutting blend of neutrino science, searches for dark matter particles, novel industrial chemistry, and biological studies of the role of natural radiation in sustaining life. This talk will look from the present toward the possible future of the laboratory with a glimpse at some outcomes of the SNOLAB 15-year planning exercise, including critical input from the scientific community.
December 10, 2025
Topic: High Energy Nuclear Physics (register here)
Speaker: Dr. James Bowen of the University of Kansas
The Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment measured dijets produced in photon-nuclear collisions using data taken at the Large Hadron Collider in late 2015. Dijet measurements are potentially useful in constraining the gluon density over a wide range of x and Q, which is needed in order to measure the quark-gluon plasma viscosity and to search for the color-glass condensate. Recently it has been suggested by several theoretical groups that photon induced dijets can also be used to examine the correlation between the gluons in the nucleus. This analysis focused on the latter, examining azimuthal correlations between the total transverse momentum of the dijets and the momentum difference of the dijets. Following the prescription suggested by theorists, a positive correlation was found.
Event Details
When: Monthly on 2nd Wednesday from 9:00 – 10:00 a.m. MT
How: online or in person at the Sanford Lab Homestake Visitor Center
Who attends: Deeper Talks is intended primarily for a research-focused audience. Most participants are specialists within the featured discipline, though researchers from related fields frequently attend and contribute valuable interdisciplinary perspectives. Attendees represent a broad spectrum of career stages, including undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and senior investigators.
Event details:
8:45 a.m. Informational Video begins
9:00 a.m. Presentation begins
9:30 a.m. Q&A with speaker
9:50 a.m. Program concludes