Boulby - Izeria

Boulby () is a hamlet in the Loftus parish, located within the North York Moors National Park. It is in the borough of Redcar and Cleveland, North Yorkshire, England. The hamlet is located off the A174, near Easington and 1-mile (1.6 km) west of Staithes. It was in the North Riding of Yorkshire until 1974, followed by the county of Cleveland until 1996. The village formerly had alum mining activity and is currently the site of Boulby mine, a 200-hectare (490-acre) site by Cleveland Potash Limited which produces half of the UK's potash output.

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ZEPLIN-III

The ZEPLIN-III dark matter experiment attempted to detect galactic WIMPs using a 12 kg liquid xenon target. It operated from 2006 to 2011 at the Boulby Underground Laboratory in Loftus, North Yorkshire. This was the last in a series of xenon-based experiments in the ZEPLIN programme pursued originally by the UK Dark Matter Collaboration (UKDMC). The ZEPLIN-III project was led by Imperial College London and also included the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the University of Edinburgh in the UK, as well as LIP-Coimbra in Portugal and ITEP-Moscow in Russia. It ruled out cross-sections for elastic scattering of WIMPs off nucleons above 3.9 × 10−8 pb (3.9 × 10−44 cm2) from the two science runs conducted at Boulby (83 days in 2008 and 319 days in 2010/11). Direct dark matter search experiments look for extremely rare and very weak collisions expected to occur between the cold dark matter particles that are believed to permeate our galaxy and the nuclei of atoms in the active medium of a radiation detector. These hypothetical elementary particles could be Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs, weighing as little as a few protons or as much as several heavy nuclei. Their nature is not yet known, but no sensible candidates remain within the Standard Model of particle physics to explain the dark matter problem.

UK Dark Matter Collaboration

The UK Dark Matter Collaboration (UKDMC) (1987–2007) was an experiment to search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). The consortium consisted of astrophysicists and particle physicists from the United Kingdom, who conducted experiments with the ultimate goal of detecting rare scattering events which would occur if galactic dark matter consists largely of a new heavy neutral particle. Detectors were set up 1,100 m (3,600 ft) underground in a halite seam at the Boulby Mine in North Yorkshire.

Boulby Mine

The Boulby Mine is an underground mining operation with surface facilities located just south-east of the village of Boulby, on the north-east coast of the North York Moors, 2.7 miles (4.3 km) east of Loftus, North Yorkshire. It is operated by Cleveland Potash Limited, a subsidiary of Israel Chemicals Ltd., ICL, which acquired the project from Anglo American plc in April 2002. In early 2016, polyhalite mining commenced. Polyhalite is a natural multi-nutrient fertiliser providing a source of potassium, calcium, magnesium, and sulphur. It is marketed as Polysulphate by ICL and is sold in three forms: granular, mini-granular and standard. As well as producing Polysulphate, a granulated blend of potash and Polysulphate is sold as PotashPluS – part of ICL's wider FertiliserPluS product spectrum. Boulby originally produced half of the United Kingdom's output of potash, an agricultural fertiliser. The mined ore consists of 35–45% sylvite ("potash", specifically potassium chloride) and 45–55% halite (rock salt, or sodium chloride). The rock salt is extracted as a by-product and used across the region as a de-icing agent on roads in winter conditions. Other minerals are produced as waste (gangue) to the main effort, but may be sought after by mineral collectors, such as boracite, which occurs just above the beds of potash.

Directional Recoil Identification from Tracks

The Directional Recoil Identification from Tracks (DRIFT) detector is a low pressure negative ion time projection chamber (NITPC) designed to detect weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) - a prime dark matter candidate. There are currently two DRIFT detectors in operation. DRIFT-IId, which is located 1100m underground in the Boulby Underground Laboratory at the Boulby Mine in North Yorkshire, England, and DRIFT-IIe, which is located on the surface at Occidental College in Los Angeles. The DRIFT collaboration ultimately aims to develop and operate an underground array of DRIFT detectors for observing and reconstructing WIMP-induced nuclear recoil tracks with enough precision to provide a signature of the dark matter halo.