A review of international underground laboratory developments

Underground laboratories are essential for various important physics areas such as the search for dark matter,double beta decay, neutrino oscillation, and proton decay.At the same time,they are also a very important location for studying rock mechanics, earth structure evolution, and ecology.It is essential for a nation's basic research capability to construct and develop underground laboratories.In the past,China had no high-quality underground laboratory,in particular no deep underground laboratory, so her scientists could not work independently in major fields such as the search for dark matter, but had to collaborate with foreign scientists and share the space of foreign underground laboratories.In 2009, Tsinghua university collaborated with the Ertan Hydropower Development Company to construct an extremely deep underground laboratory,the first in China and currently the deepest in the world,in the Jinping traffic tunnel which was built to develop hydropower from the Yalong River in Sichuan province.This laboratory is named the China Jinping Underground Laborotory (CJPL) and formally opened on December 12,2010.It is now a major independent platform in China and can host various leading basic research projects. We present a brief review of the development of various international underground laboratories,and especially describe CJPL in detail.