SNOLAB has enjoyed a number of high-profile milestones, not the least of which was helping Dr. Art McDonald win the Nobel Prize in physics this year.
Now, it has crossed yet another milestone, becoming the first underground lab (and the first Canadian partnership) in the world to join the Mexican education program, Scientific Summers in Foreign Laboratories.
That might not sound as fun as, say, spending the summer on beach on some tropical island, but if you’re a physics student, spending two months two kilometres underground working to try to answer fundamental questions about the nature of reality, SNOLAB is way better than a tropical paradise.
The program is organized by the Division of Particles and Fields of the Mexican Physical Society (DPF-MPS). Guillermo Lara, a physics student with the Faculty of Science at the National Autonomous University of México, is the student chosen after a rigorous selection process to spend his summer at SNOLAB, which is underground at Creighton Mine.
He was picked from a group of 30 top students, put through his paces conducting high-energy physics experiments and ultimately picked for the program. Lara spent his summer working with PICO collaboration, a bubble chamber experiment using super-heated fluid to search for dark matter particles.
“I feel very grateful for the opportunity to work alongside and learn from the very passionate scientists, staff and students that make all of this possible,” Lara said in a news release.
While at SNOLAB, Lara has been working under the direct supervision of Dr. Ian Lawson, a research scientist at SNOLAB, and Dr. Eric Vázquez-Jáuregui, a research associate at the Institute of Physics at the National Autonomous University of México, a member of DPF-MPS and researcher with the PICO collaboration.
“There are many enthusiastic young students in México, eager to learn about experimental neutrino physics and dark matter,” Dr. Vázquez-Jáuregui said. “I am thankful to Dr. Nigel Smith, SNOLAB director, and to SNOLAB for supporting our country and giving our students the opportunity to get involved in leading experiments in this world-class laboratory.”
Since the Scientific Summers in Foreign Laboratories programme’s start in the early 1990’s, over 100 students have gained valuable experience during summer placements in notable labs such as Fermilab, CERN, and, most recently, SNOLAB.
