Sanford Underground Research Facility

From 1962 to 1994, Raymond Davis Jr. built and operated the first successful detector for solar neutrinos using John N. Bahcall’s theoretical model and working with William A. Fowler, Maurice Goldhaber, and numerous engineers and crew members on the 4850 Level of the Homestake Mine—now the Davis Campus at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. The result of Davis’s observations, just one third the theoretical expected flux, led to fundamental advances in particle physics and astrophysics. For his work, Davis received a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Masatoshi Koshiba for his research into the detection of cosmic neutrinos.