February 11, 2026
Virtual or Sanford Lab Homestake Visitor Center, Lead, SD
US/Mountain timezone

Stacie Granum, The Institute for Underground Science at SURF

Topic: Updates on low-background counting at SURF: the BHSU Underground Campus (BHUC)

This talk presents the low-background counting infrastructure of the Black Hills State University Underground Campus (BHUC), located on the 4850 level of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), and its role in providing ultra-low-background assay capabilities within the SURF ecosystem. The facility currently operates four ultra-low-background, high-purity germanium (HPGe) detectors, optimized for material screening and rare-event background characterization, with three additional HPGe detectors anticipated to be commissioned within the next year.

 

The talk will also describe the recent transition of the BHUC detector suite from the Davis Campus back to its original location at the Ross Campus, including the associated infrastructure upgrades, and will discuss available space and experimental opportunities for new low-background counting and screening experiments within the BHUC.

 

 

Speaker: Dr. Brianna Mount

Brianna Mount is the lab director of the BHSU Underground Campus (BHUC), which is a cleanroom facility on the 4850' level of SURF and she is the PI of the BHSU Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer (ICP-MS) lab. Through both of these projects, she has been able to build interdisciplinary collaborations with biologists and chemists and is a member of the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) and Ge-STAR collaborations.

You can register for this talk here.

Conference information

Date/Time

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All times are in US/Mountain

Location

Virtual or Sanford Lab Homestake Visitor Center, Lead, SD
160 W Main Street Lead, SD 57754