Phil Castle, The Business Times

Ten acrylic tanks manufactured in Grand Junction could help answer one of the most fundamental questions ever posed: What’s the universe made of?

Reynolds Polymer Technology will provide the tanks for an experiment under construction nearly a mile under the Black Hills of South Dakota. The experiment, scheduled to begin next year, is designed to detect subatomic particles believed to constitute the so-called dark matter thought to account for the bulk of the universe.

Logan Gillespie, operations project manager for Reynolds Polymer, says the effort constitutes yet another example of what’s become something of a mission statement for the Grand Junction-based company in building the impossible. “I think it’s really cool.”

Doug McCaw, senior project engineer, says the company has long enjoyed a reputation in the scientific community for meeting exacting standards. But that work also helps in developing products for other applications, among them aquariums, zoos and architectural features. “It helps us to expand and grow our capability.”

Reynolds Polymer is the sole acrylic provider for LUX-ZEPLIN, a project funded and managed by the Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The experiment will be conducted in the Sanford Underground Research Facility set up inside the century-old Homestake Mine in Lead, S.D. The LZ will be 30 times larger and is expected to be at least 100 times more sensitive to finding signals from dark matter than its predecessor.

Scientists estimate 84 percent of the mass of the universe is comprised of so-called dark matter, a proportion believed to be far greater than all visible matter. Dark matter could infer the extra mass and gravity that explains why galaxies hold together and background radiation fluctuates. But dark matter doesn’t emit, reflect or absorb detectable amounts of light. While more remains unknown than known, some scientists theorize dark matter is mostly composed of exotic subatomic particles formed when the universe was a fraction of a second old. Such particles could include what are called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS), billions of which are believed to pass unimpeded through the earth every second.

The LUX-ZEPLIN project derives its name from the acronyms for two efforts — the large underground xenon experiment and ZonEd proportional scintillation in liquid noble gases experiment.

The LZ project will include at it’s center a chamber constructed of medical-grade titanium and filled with 10 metric tons of purified liquid xenon. If a dark matter particle collides with a xenon atom, it will create a flash of flight followed by a second flash when electrons produced in the chamber drift to the top. The signature flashes will be picked up by 500 light-amplifying tubes lining the chamber.

Reynolds Polymer manufactured 10 acrylic tanks that will surround the xenon chamber. The four largest tanks measure more than 12 feet tall and nearly 8 feet wide and weigh more than 1,500 pounds each. Other tanks are smaller, some of them only 2-foot tall and 14-inches wide. The tanks are made with acrylic sheets that allow ultraviolet light to pass through.

Gillespie and McCaw say that’s a crucial specification because the tanks will be used to measure unwanted particles and veto false dark matter signals. The tanks will be filled with what’s called scintillator fluid that produces flashes in reacting with particles — flashes that will be measured by a separate array of light-amplifying tubes.

The xenon chamber and acrylic veto tanks will be installed inside a third vessel filled with 70,000 gallons of water.

Reynolds Polymer has delivered four of the tanks and soon will deliver six more, Gillespie says. Installation is expected to conclude later this year. The experiment is scheduled to begin in 2020 and continue for five years.

Reynolds Polymer was selected to supply the tanks in part because of the experience of the company with other projects, including the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory constructed 6,280 feet underground near Sudbury, Canada. Reynolds Polymer engineered and manufactured components for an acrylic sphere that measured 40 feet across and was filled with 1,100 tons of heavy water used to detect neutrinos, another type of subatomic particle. Arthur MacDonald, director of the observatory, won a Nobel Prize in physics for his work there.

“As a company, we’ve been known by the scientific community for a long time,” McCaw says.

Sally Shaw, a researcher from the University of California Santa Barbara, works to make sure the tanks meet the exacting requirements of the LUX-ZEPLIN project.

“Reynolds Polymer Technology has a sterling reputation amongst the particle physics community,” Shaw says in a news release from Reynolds Polymer. “Their successful completion of a number of first-rate projects, including the Nobel Prize-winning Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and the Daya Bay neutrino experiment, made them the obvious choice for the LZ experiment to provide not only impeccable acrylic tanks, but excellent customer service and a thorough understanding of the unusual needs of the project.”

McCaw says every project presents its own unique challenges, but the complex shapes and tight tolerances specified for the LUX-ZEPLIN project were especially challenging. “It was a bit of effort.”

But that effort pays off in other projects Reynolds Polymer takes on not only for scientific research, but also aquariums, water attractions and architectural features, he says.

Reynolds Polymer has constructed some of the largest aquariums in the world. That includes the AquaDom in a Berlin hotel complex that’s more than 50-feet tall and 36 feet in diameter and an even taller aquarium in the Avia Park shopping mall in Moscow. Construction is underway on the Sky Pool in London, a transparent swimming pool that will span two, 10-story residential buildings. The pool will be more than 80 feet long and 16 feet wide and enable residents to swim from one building to the next.

As business has increased for Reynolds Polymer, so has staffing. About 100 employees work at the Grand Junction facility.

Gillespie says Reynolds Polymer strives to realize its mission of building the impossible and hopes the company can help with the LUX-ZEPLIN project in achieving another audacious goal: Determining what the university is made of.