As year 2019 started, three members of the NEWS-G collaboration got granted with different awards for their outstanding research projects.

On January 28th, 2020, NEWS-G collaborators from Kingston (Queen’s University) and Edmonton (University of Alberta) connected in Sudbury, Ontario to prepare for the installation of the detector at SNOLAB. Components of the detector were cleaned and prepared for the journey underground, installation logistics were reviewed and finalized, and the graduate students, along with Dr. Gilles Gerbier, received important health and safety training to allow them to work in the mine over the coming months.

In late April Queen’s faculty Gilles Gerbier, Ryan Martin and Guillaume Giroux welcomed four new Queen’s undergraduate student summer researchers to the NEWS-G collaboration.

The bulk of NEWS-G activities have been conducted off-site and online since the onset of the pandemic in mid-March and the resultant closure of the Queen’s University laboratory. The installation of the detector at SNOLAB (originally planned for the spring of 2020) has likewise been stalled. Throughout recent months NEWS-G researchers have been diligently working on data analysis and simulations, albeit remotely.

NEWS-G collaborator and PhD candidate Daniel Durnford (University of Alberta) won first place for best oral presentation by a student within the Particle Physics Division at the (online) 2020 Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) conference. The conference was held by video teleconferencing and was well attended, providing a much-needed moment of connection for a community that looks forward to this annual reunion of physicists.

Below former Queen’s University Undergraduate student and current University of Alberta MSc student Carter Garrah introduces NEWS-G’s latest (non-spherical) detector.

Introducing NEWS-G’s latest (non-spherical) detector: a Micromegas-based muon telescope!

The installation of the NEWS-G detector has restarted at SNOLAB in September, after a long delay caused by the Covid-19 pandemics. It started with a final cleaning of the copper sphere, dubbed SNOGLOBE.

All the pieces and equipment had been delivered at the beginning of the year, most of them coming from France after the successful test at Laboratoire Souterrain de Modane (LSM) in 2019.

Have you ever wondered what it is like to build a dark matter experiment two kilometres below the earth’s surface?

After many years of preparation, the installation of the NEWS-G experiment was finally completed in early August 2021.