The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory is an underground science laboratory located more than two kilometres beneath the surface of Vale Inco’s Creighton mine near Sudbury. Its purpose is to detect solar neutrinos.
Behind the Nobel prize win for Canadian scientist Arthur McDonald is the story of two renowned world-class scientific research facilities – one in the Ottawa Valley and another in an underground nickel mine near Sudbury.
SNOLAB, about 25 kilometres west of Sudbury, is a pioneering 10-storey facility built more than 2 kilometres beneath the surface of Vale Canada's Creighton mine. It was there Dr. McDonald headed up the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) from 1989 to 2007, and with a team of researchers made a groundbreaking discovery on neutrinos.
Today, after an injection of funding between 2002 and 2008, the original SNO facility has expanded into a general-purpose particle physics laboratory where scientists from around the world explore several phenomena. Some experiments under way at SNOLAB are seeking to verify the existence of dark matter, the mysterious substance that accounts for most of the mass of the universe and may consist of undiscovered types of particles.
"In the way that you have to take neutrino detectors deep underground to shield them from cosmic radiation, the same is true for dark matter particles," said Nigel Smith, SNOLAB's director.
"So the environment that you create for a neutrino project is ideal for other types of science. That was, really, the tremendous progress made by SNO in demonstrating this was feasible," he added.
Dr. McDonald's path to global recognition passed through other important scientific incubators.
The Chalk River Laboratories once represented a robust era of government-funded scientific research going back to the postwar period. From 1969 until 1981, Dr. McDonald used the facility's particle accelerators to carry out experiments in nuclear physics. At the same facility in the 1950s and early 1960s, another Canadian physicist, Bertram Brockhouse, conducted experiments in neutron scattering. In 1994, he would be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics.
While the Sudbury project continues to be a thriving hub of scientific collaboration and discovery, the Chalk River facility's role is diminishing.
The nuclear reactor at the centre of the Ottawa Valley facility, operating mainly for scientific research and discovery since 1957, is scheduled to shut down in 2018. The money-losing commercial arm that built 20 CANDU nuclear reactors in Canada and exported a dozen others around the world was sold to SNC-Lavalin in 2011.
The reactor continues to be the source of much of the world's radioisotopes, used in hospitals for patients during the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
The story of Chalk River and the nearby town of Deep River represent a unique chapter in Canadian science history.
In the 1950s, Deep River hosted many of the scientists at the Chalk River facility and their growing families. The town boasted one of the highest birth rates and arguably the smartest inhabitants in the country.
"One hundred and six PhDs are employed at Chalk River, among them some of the most brilliant scientific minds in Canada. Coffee- and cocktail-party chatter deliberately skirts any mention of the hazards involved in their experiments with new applications of atomic power," wrote journalist Peter C. Newman for Maclean's Magazine in 1958.
The town and the lab facility are important to Gregory Leng's family history. His mother taught in the local high school and his father was a British scientist who joined the Chalk River program around 1957.
"It attracted a lot of top scientists, so it really was a magnet for Canada," said Mr. Leng.
At Chalk River, Mr. Leng's father, John Leng, collaborated with an employee of U.S.-based Digital Equipment Corporation, Gordon Bell, to develop an electronic control board for the reactor. The two men would eventually conceptualize the first mini-computer that was sold commercially in the 1970s.