Thursday, October 31, 2013

A Blow to Possible Dark Matter

Summary: This is sorta the opposite of the news I would like to tell you about, but it does help refine our search for the elusive particles.
Back in April, the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment looked like it had captured three candidates for dark matter particles.These particles had a mass approximately nine times that of a proton. However, yesterday, scientists working on the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment made an announcement negating CDMS's results. They argued that if the particles found by CDMS were in fact dark matter particles, then the larger and more sensitive LUX experiment that they had run would have seen about 1600 of these in their first run. However, their first run came up empty. It is of course possible that there are WIMPs hiding in the data or maybe they will be seen on the second run, but until then we have hit another wall in our quest.



Symmetry
Scientific American

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