Geoscience, Engineering, and Physics Opportunities at the China JinPing Underground Laboratory, its Extension, and at Other Sites > 2000 m

The expansion of the China JinPing Laboratory (CJPL) is planned along a main branch of a bypass tunnel in the JinPing tunnel complex during 2013 -2015. This second phase of CJPL (CJPL-2) will have laboratory space increased from existing volume of nearly 2,000 m3 to approximately 80,000m3. In this presentation, we first review the geophysical and engineering findings during the originally tunnel excavations of the JingPing tunnel complexes which are substantially under overburdens from 2,000 to 2,500 m. Acoustic emissions associated with excavation disturbed zones and fracture openings in the excavation damaged zones were monitored before some sudden rock bust events were observed. The CJPL-2 offers opportunities to validate the rock burst modeling and prediction capabilities for other deep excavation studies. We also discuss the possibilities of other local, regional, and global monitoring of seismic-induced radon emission and electromagnetic monitoring studies, coupled process in situ measurements, and other experiments from the prospective of geoscience studies at depths over 2000 m. Geophysical and engineering opportunities were evaluated together with the physics experiments requirements in a 2015 town meeting associated with the 13th International Conference on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics (TAUP). The main objective of CJPL-2 is to provide amber spaces needed worldwide for physics rare event detections that can be benefited to locate at CJPL-2, the currently deepest physics laboratory. Discussions the TAUP town meeting included one-ton expansions of current CJPL setups of Germanium detector in the China Darkmatter EXperiment (CDEX), two-phase Xenon detector of the PandiX experiment, other cryogenic dark matter detectors, superheated liquid detectors, scintillation solar neutrino detectors, neutrino-less double beta decay detectors, nuclear astrophysics synthesis accelerators, and other experimental and detector ideas.