Jinping Mountain, Sichuan (Web Desk) – Located 2,400 meters under the Earth’s surface, the Deep Underground and Ultra-low Radiation Background Facility for Frontier Physics Experiments (DURF) is the world’s deepest underground laboratory.
In December 2020, Tsinghua University and Yalong River Hydropower Development Company, Ltd.
began work on a daring project under Jinping Mountain in Sichuan’s Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture.
Constructed to support China’s exploration in various frontier fields, including particle physics, nuclear astrophysics, and life sciences, the DURF (Deep Underground and Ultra-low Radiation Background Facility for Frontier Physics Experiments) is renowned for providing an exceptionally clean environment on Earth.
Situated 2,400 meters below ground, this extreme depth shields the facility from cosmic rays, making it an ideal space to investigate dark matter—an invisible substance.
With a remarkable room capacity of 330,000 cubic meters, equivalent to about 120 Olympic-sized swimming pools, DURF stands out not only as the world’s deepest underground lab but also the largest.
It is almost double the size of the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, now the second-largest underground laboratory in the world.
Apart from facilitating the study of dark matter, the substance believed to make up approximately 27% of the universe’s mass-energy density, the world’s deepest underground laboratory is also poised to become a hub for cutting-edge scientific research, attracting brilliant minds from around the globe.
