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.
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
This talk will be in two parts: first reminiscences of Jose Alonso’s days as the first Lab Director of SURF, and some of the adventures of reopening the Homestake gold mine and launching the new science laboratory; then some observations regarding new facilities and research tools that will provide SURF with truly unique world-leading capabilities for studying some of the Universe’s deepest questions. Folding in the plans SURF is developing for new caverns in an expanded Ross Campus, with the possibility of Theia, a new multi-kiloton detector using water-based liquid scintillator deployed in one of these new caverns, this campus will provide a diverse set of detection technologies of unprecedented size and sensitivity capable of probing different detection pathways for both the long-baseline beam from Fermilab, as well as local sources of neutrinos. For the latter, SURF would install in a separate new cavern in the same Ross Campus, compact accelerators capable of producing intense fluxes of neutrinos — and possibly other BSM (Beyond-Standard-Model) particles — from DAR (Decay-At-Rest) sources generated by megawatt-level proton beams. IsoDAR Collaboration's plans are quite mature now for the deployment of a compact 60 MeV cyclotron, generating a 600 kW proton beam, and its installation adjacent to a planned 2.4 kiloton liquid scintillator detector at Yemilab, a new underground laboratory in South Korea. This beam will flood a sleeve of Li-7 with neutrons from the beryllium target, producing an intense flux of electron antineutrinos from Li-8 decay. A complex is envisioned at SURF with a second generation of this accelerator and target, with huge sensitivity gains resulting from the massive installed detector capabilities. The IsoDAR cyclotron can in addition be used as the injector for a larger, 800 MeV compact cyclotron, first proposed for the DAEdALUS project in the early days of DUSEL (SURF). This larger machine would provide 8 MW of protons on a carbon target, in an energy range ideally suited for pion production, below the kaon threshold, yielding a clean and well-understood spectrum of neutrinos. This source, coupled with SURF's detectors will provide more than an order of magnitude higher sensitivity over the existing pion DAR experiments: JSNS2 at JPARC in Japan, CCM at LANSCE in Los Alamos, and Coherent in the “neutrino alley” at the SNS at Oak Ridge. This accelerator complex would be deployed in a separate cavern, designed to contain the activation products associated with high-power accelerators, and located in close proximity to both the LBNF and Theia caverns. Jose Alonso proposes that exploring the physics opportunities of these intense sources of neutrinos, both local and distant, with the enormous detection capabilities, be the topic of one or more future workshops which would undoubtedly build a very strong case for these programs, extending beyond the original scope of DUNE.
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: Measuring Dijets From Ultra-Peripheral Heavy Ion Collisions (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
9:40 a.m. Q&A with speaker
9:50 a.m. Program concludes