News

A team from the Centre for Experimental Physics and Quantum Technology recently travelled to the North East of England to visit the Boulby Underground Laboratory – one of the UK's most specialised research facilities, located more than a kilometre below ground in the nation's deepest mine – the ICL Boulby polyhalite mine.

The visiting team included researchers from experimental particle physics (Marcella Bona, Seth Senz, Adrian Bevan and Dominic Howgill), quantum science themes (Jan Mol and James Thomas), and our SPCS facilities team (Atanas Tomov). During the visit, we toured the laboratory's cutting‑edge infrastructure, which supports dark‑matter searches and low‑background experiments, and held discussions on laboratory expansion and the development of a quantum‑technologies research programme that will take advantage of this unique environment. This was not only an excellent opportunity to explore new avenues for applied and curiosity‑driven particle physics research, but also has a link to Queen Mary's history–the UK's first dark‑matter experiment was housed in the Queens' Building here in the heart of East London.

The visit also provided an opportunity to deploy environmental‑monitoring technology currently under development by the detector‑development team at QMUL. A system installed during the trip is already collecting valuable data, and we look forward to expanding our collaborations further.