Our modern look for darkish matter suggests we are searching within the wrong location

Deep underground, at the bottom of a mine within the Black Hills of South Dakota, scientists have been running for 3 years on one of the maximum sensitive experiments ever performed.

they have been searching for out why four fifths of the problem within the Universe seems to be missing. we are able to see its have an effect on, within the rotation of galaxies and the way mild curves as it travels thru the cosmos.

however the actual substance, which physicists name "darkish depend", is proving elusive, and they're seeking to determine out why.

The leading concept is "weakly interacting large debris", or WIMPs. If the WIMP concept is accurate, then the Universe is flooded with them - billions bypass thru your body every 2d. however due to the fact they may be "weakly interacting", you do not word.

To attempt to verify the lifestyles of those debris, researchers crammed a bath with 370kg of liquid xenon cooled under -110C.

They took the bathtub right down to the bottom of a mine, a mile beneath the surface of the Earth, to shield it from cosmic rays, and surrounded it with sensors that must be able to spot if a WIMP collided with a xenon atom inside the tank.

The experiment changed into referred to as LUX - quick for "big Underground Xenon", and it ran for twenty months.

Null end result

however they located nothing. At a convention in Sheffield, the LUX group admitted that the $10 million test - which had the very best sensitivity of any thus far - had not found any evidence of the lifestyles of dark count debris, despite exceeding its technical goals.

"we are kind of proud that it labored so nicely and additionally dissatisfied that we failed to see some thing," said college of California, Berkeley physicist Daniel McKinsey, one of the clinical spokespersons for the assignment.

but the quest continues. The website of the experiment is now being renovated for a new, $50 million model of the same system - so one can be 70 times more sensitive and start in 2020.

Tiny Black Holes

If that again fails to locate some thing, we might also need to begin thinking about different opportunities. One is that the dark matter is accounted for by way of zillions of tiny black holes.

however that concept has plenty of problems of its personal, and WIMPs are still the main theoretical candidate.

"LUX has accomplished a whole lot extra in phrases of its sensitivity and reliability than we ever anticipated it to do," stated Rick Gaitskell, another of the mission's spokespersons. "We continually want extra time with our detectors, however it is time to take the instructions found out from LUX and observe them to the future search for darkish be counted."