Hear about the scientific work happening underground in regional Australia, unlocking the mysteries of the universe!

Everything we see—stars, planets, people—make up less than 5% of the total mass of the universe. The rest is made of mysterious invisible substances called dark matter and dark energy. Scientists often go to extreme lengths to find answers about the cosmos. To help unlock the secrets to these cosmic forces, researchers from the new Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory (SUPL) have built an underground lab a kilometre underground in regional Victoria!

Find out about the exciting new detector in the SUPLlab designed to hunt for interactions between dark matter and ordinary matter; something that’s never been directly observed.  It’s one of the most ambitious quests ever undertaken, and it’s happening right beneath our feet.

Professor Elisabetta Barberio is a professor of physics at the University of Melbourne and the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics. She initiated the direct detection dark
matter program in Australia, which led to the construction of the first underground laboratory in the Southern Hemisphere, the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory (SUPL) in Victoria. SUPL will host the SABRE experiment, the first Australian dark matter direct detection experiment led by her.

Professor Barberio was a researcher at CERN, the European laboratory of Particle Physics, where she performed measurements that confirmed the theory describing fundamental particles behaviour to an extraordinary degree of precision and she had an important role in the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle at the Large Hadron Collider.  She was recently awarded Italy’s highest-ranking honour, the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (Cavaliere dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana), for outstanding contributions to experimental particle physics research.