(S.D.)-Search For Radioactive Decay Continues In SD Lab LEAD,
S.D. (AP) - Physicists in South Dakota have started assembling
"detector units" in the search for a rare form of radioactive
decay that could help explain how the universe evolved. The
Majorana Demonstrator Experiment is under construction in the
Davis Campus of a shuttered gold mine in Lead in the Black
Hills. It's next door to another experiment meant to detect dark
matter. Both experiments are housed nearly a mile beneath the
earth in the former Homestake Gold Mine. Officials with the
Sanford Underground Research Facility say that the first
detector units were built through Monday when physicist Ryan
Martin "attached a polished germanium-crystal detector the size
of a hockey puck to a wafer-thin glass electronics board." The
experiment will need about 70 such units to search for
neutrinoless double-beta decay. (Copyright 2012 The Associated
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