Research on the run

Dr. Aprile was born in Milan. To say that she lives a peripatetic life would be an understatement. She teaches at Columbia but commutes regularly to L’Aquila, a town in central Italy near the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, which lies off a tunnel through the mountain of the same name, beneath nearly 4,600 feet of rock.

Until March she had been living the typical jet-setting life of particle physicist. In November she attended a physics conference in South Korea. In February, after a brief stop in New York, she was in Italy at Gran Sasso for three days. From there she went to a conference in South Africa, and on to the University of California, San Diego, where she was a visiting professor.

Then the universities shut down. Worried about her two daughters, who live in New York, Dr. Aprile returned home. She had planned to return to Gran Sasso in early May after her professorship was done, when they would start testing and running their detector. But the virus had other plans.

Stefano Ragazzi, director of the Gran Sasso lab, said that the experiments there are designed to be conducted remotely. As a result, there were only about half a dozen scientists on site in March when the coronavirus hit Italy.

It is safer and easier to keep experiments running, rather than shut them off and later switch them back on, he explained, so the lab’s experiments have continued to operate as they would during the winter holidays.

Dr. Ragazzi announced that, to ensure the safety of the people and the equipment, work in Gran Sasso would be limited only to what was necessary.

“Xenon was amid critical ongoing operations,” Dr. Ragazzi said in an email. “We asked them to come to a safe stopping point and to pause operations.”