SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Gran Sasso: Chamber of Physics
from Nature News
The drive along Italy's highway A24 from the central Adriatic coast towards Rome begins with a winding climb into the snow-covered Apennine Mountains, followed by a plunge into the 10-kilometre-long tunnel under Gran Sasso, the highest peak in the region. About half way through the tunnel, a detour leads off to the right. It reaches a dead end almost immediately at a heavy iron gate. But press the intercom button and utter the words 'particle physicist' into the microphone, and the gate slides open like something from a James Bond movie.
Not far beyond the gate is a car park. From there one continues on foot, and begins to get some idea of the scale of the infrastructure hidden beneath the mountain. Opening off a long corridor are three huge halls, each about 20 metres wide, 18 metres high and 100 metres long. This vast area is the home of the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, part of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN).
In fact, the laboratory's 180,000 cubic metres of space is not its most valuable attribute. Lying under 1,400 metres of rock, it offers silence--not an absence of sound, but of cosmic-ray noise, the rain of particles constantly bombarding Earth's surface from space. This lack of cosmic interference has attracted a generation of physicists to these halls, where they can study some of the rarest and most elusive phenomena in the Universe.
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