Physics

Located an hour's drive from the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in the beautiful Black Hills, South Dakota Mines has made recent hires resulting in a group of seven faculty collaborating on internationally recognized underground/under-ice physics experiments to increase our understanding of particle physics and the universe, complementing the department's historic strengths in experimental and theoretical condensed matter and material science, all summarized below. Light TA loads and strong external funding allow graduate students to focus on research early, and undergraduates also take part in research both for pay and for academic credits.

Astroparticle physics with IceCube

IceCube is the largest neutrino observatory located at the geographic South Pole, Antarctica. Scientists from 53 institutions in 12 countries use IceCube data to look for neutrinos from the most violent astrophysical sources (such as supernova explosions, gamma-ray bursts, and cataclysmic phenomena involving black holes and neutron stars), study the origin and properties of high energy cosmic rays and TeV gamma rays, measure the cross sections and properties of neutrinos at much higher energy than that produced at the most most powerful accelerator, search for annihilations of dark matter particles, and a lot more. IceCube is a key observatory in the new era of multi-messenger astronomy.

Xinhua Bai, Matthias Plum

Condensed Matter

Our condensed matter faculty are active in computational condensed matter physics of quantum materials, including functional oxides, intermetallic alloys, and the two-dimensional Van der Waals materials, and in investigations of ferroelectric, magnetic, and magnetoelectric materials.

Tula Paudel, Vladimir Sobolev

Dark Matter

Astrophysical observations have provided indirect, yet compelling, evidence that most of the mass of our Universe is "dark” and in the form of elementary particles that have never been directly detected. South Dakota Mines physicists play important roles on both of the Generation-2 experiments trying to directly detect dark matter particles underground, LZ at nearby Sanford Lab and SuperCDMS SNOLAB in Canada. They are performing research and development towards the planned Generation-3 experiment XLZD. Direct detection of dark matter particles would teach us about the nature of particles beyond the standard model of particle physics that have driven the formation of structure in the Universe, such as galaxies and galaxy clusters.

Juergen Reichenbacher, Richard Schnee

Neutrino Physics

Neutrino researchers at South Dakota Mines are part of four large international experiments: DUNE, MicroBooNE, T2K, and ANNIE. The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), whose far site detector will be located 1 mile underground at nearby Sanford Lab here in the Black Hills, is poised to become the biggest experiment on US soil. A beam of neutrinos will be produced at the near site at Fermilab in the Chicago area and sent to South Dakota for precise studies of neutrinos and their properties. It will also study astrophysical neutrinos from galactic supernovae and our Sun. MicroBooNE is a 170 ton Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber that took neutrino data from 2015 to 2020 on Fermilab’s Booster Neutrino Beamline (BNB). The major physics goals of MicroBooNE are to address the low energy excess measured by the MiniBooNE experiment, and to obtain high statistics cross section measurements of neutrino interactions in argon. ANNIE is a water Cherenkov neutrino experiment at Fermilab, currently taking beam data to study neutrino-nucleus interactions and test novel photon detection techniques. The Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) experiment located in Japan, is a long-baseline neutrino experiment currently in operation that studies neutrino oscillations and neutrino properties.

David Martinez Caicedo, Juergen Reichenbacher, Jingbo Wang, Xinhua Bai

Nuclear Astrophysics

Nuclear Astrophysics addresses open questions at the intersection of nuclear physics, astrophysics, and observational astronomy. The main focus is the study of nuclear processes that control stellar burning and the associated nucleosynthesis. The field explores the chemical evolution of our universe, determines the energetics of astrophysical objects, and identifies their observational signatures.
This branch of research in the department focuses on the question of nuclear physics in low temperature stellar environments. The flagship experiment is the Compact Accelerator System for Performing Astrophysical Research ( CASPAR) located a mile underground in the former Homestake gold mine, now Sanford Underground Research Facility ( SURF), in Lead, South Dakota.

Frank Strieder