As recently reported in a magazine Nature, China’s new underground dark matter detection laboratory is now the world’s largest, deepest and one step closer to uncovering the universe’s most mysterious fundamental matter. The second phase of the China Jinping Underground Laboratory (CJPL-II) was completed in December and now has a total area of 330,000 cubic meters, or about 11.7 million cubic feet of laboratory space, the previous record holder for Italy. It surpassed the Gran Sasso National Laboratory. Due to natural rock shielding, only 0.000001% of cosmic rays hit his underground CJPL-II laboratory as they hit the surface. This subatomic quiet state is important for detecting traces of subtle dark matter.
“With increased sensitivity, we can play around with the detector and test different kinds of interactions,” Panda He explained that it shields cubic meters of water.
Zhou said the team’s goal is to build a xenon detector comparable to Europe’s DARWIN experiment, which has a capacity of 40 tons. He said the CJPL-II team will continue to improve the sensitivity of xenon and germanium detectors over the next decade, and encourages the global dark matter research community to share the CJPL-II dataset and combine it with their own datasets. He said he was looking forward to it.