SNOLAB Status
20 October 2007

Excavation of the Phase I areas of SNOLAB including the Ladder Labs and Cube hall was completed in June of 2007.  Excavation of the Cryopit is well underway. To date over 86,000 Tonnes of rock have been removed with approximately 12,000 Tonnes remaining.   Outfitting of the laboratory began in June and is progressing well with occupation of the new personnel facilities  and the Phase I experimental areas expected in early 2008. 


Laboratory Entrance
The laboratory entrance is transistion region from the dirty mine environment to the CLASS 2000 clean room interior of the laboratory.  Initially only adjacent to the SNO facilities, it is being relocated 80 m to the east of it's present location to encompass the new experimental facilities.  Its capacity is also being increased by a factor of two to accomodate the larger work force that will be present in the completed underground laboratory.
 


The civil work is well along with the steel work for mezzanines completed and most of the massonary work done.   The electrical, plumbing and ventilation infrastructure are being installed.




Phase I Experimental Spaces

Phase I of SNOLAB adds two new experimental spaces, the Cube Hall is a large cavern 18m long by 15m wide by 20m high and is intended to host a large 15m scale experiment.  The Ladder Labs is a network of smaller drifts intended to house two  smaller, 5m scale experiments. 

Cube Hall
The Cube Hall is a large cavern 18m long by 15m wide by 20m high intended for large experiments.  Excavation is complete.  The concrete liner on the walls and floor are in done and the main stair well is in place.   Painting of the hall will begin  shortly.


Ladder Labs
The Ladder Lab excavation is complete.  The walls have been painted and some infrastructure for the services is being installed.  The area is being used to stage the construction materials for the lab entry outfitting including the fabrication of ducts for the ventilation systems.


Phase II Cryopit
Provincial funding for the cryopit was announced on 21 August 2007.  When complete, the Cryopit will be a cylindrical cavity 15 m in diameter and 20 m high.  Excavation is well along with the top sill and approximately half of the utility area completed.  Excavation will continue into the middle of 2008 and outfitting is expected to be completed by the end of 2008.

With completion of the top sill, a drop raise will be excavated between the top sill and the bottom access.  The pit will then be excavated in benches and the broken rock removed from below through the drop raise.

The remaining heavy water on site is in the form of a brine which contains the 2 tonnes of NaCl used for the Phase II neutral current detection.  This salt is being removed by distillation and will be completed by the end of the year.  While the primary data taking for SNO has been completed, analysis of the data is expected to continue for several years.  As well, various supporting calibration measurements are still being done.

The SNO Caven is now complete drained and preparations are underway for conversion of the detector to operate with liquid scintillator for the SNO+ experiment.  SNO+ will utilize the existing SNO detector replacing the heavy water with liquid scintillator and be able to make sensitive measurements of PEP solar neutrinos, geo neutrinos and anti neutrinos from nuclear reactors.  An important part of the SNO+  experimental program will be the addition of Neodymium to the detector to search for neutrinoless double beta decay.

The PICASSO dark matter experiment is operational and is scaling up the number of detector modules underground.  PICASSO uses fluorine in C₄F₁₀ liquid droplets suspended in a gel matrix as a spin dependent WIMP target.