While the nickel mine has been around since the 1920s, the physics lab was only founded in 1992. Well, the good news is that the majority of researchers do agree that, like a lion in the desert, dark matter should be out there. But this is true only if you know that a lion lives in the desert. If you search for a lion in the desert, you can find it eventually by excluding successively bigger regions of the desert in which you do not find the lion until you narrow the region to the footprint of the lion itself, he says. “The game is one about steady progress over years and decades, slowly chipping away at the possible range of models,” says Dan Hooper, an astrophysicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) just outside Chicago.Īvi Loeb, a Harvard astronomer, describes science as “an island of knowledge surrounded by an ocean of ignorance”. Researchers knew what they were looking for and null results year after year helped them to better constrain their search limits. After all, it took a century to detect gravitational waves, predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916, and nearly half a century to spot the Higgs boson in the LHC. ![]() That’s because setting tighter and tighter limits rules out hypotheses that seem viable, narrowing the window of search. “The only difference is that if you find dark matter, you get a Nobel Prize, but the importance in setting the limits is just the same,” says physicist Walter Fulgione from Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy. just a little bit longer? Well, turns out that for the researchers who have devoted their whole life to dark matter, null results are ultra-important – nearly as important as finding something. So just how much longer can researchers justify that they are looking for something unknown and finding nothing, but still get away with asking for more money to look for nothing. Scientists are even trying to create these particles in the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva (which cost nearly $7 billion to build). That’s the main (some say most obvious) dark matter candidate several detectors are searching for. SuperCDMS will be looking for a very specific type of such exotic particles, so-called WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. The leading theory is that dark matter is made out of particles that interact with normal, atomic, matter or light only through gravity - by exerting a gravitational pull. So far, they have found nothing (well, they've only been looking for a year). In India, Jaduguda Underground Science Laboratory opened last year, 550 meters below the surface at an operating uranium mine. The PandaX experiment in the Jin-Ping sub-terrain laboratory in China hasn't spotted any particles either. ![]() ![]() In France, the EDELWEISS experiment in a lab under the French Alps, under 1.7 km of rock, has found nothing. Apart from SNOLAB, there is the LUX experiment in Lead, South Dakota, one mile underground in an abandoned gold mine. Mightier than any other (and there are many), the uber-sensitive SuperCDMS will cost some $34 million – and will be tasked with finally spotting what no other detector has spotted yet no pressure.ĭespite huge pots of money being poured since the 1970s into dark matter experiments on, under or above Earth, despite endless late nights spent doing calculations, and despite plenty of media coverage, researchers keep getting nowhere. The lab, operating since 2011, has just received funding approval from the US Department of Energy to build a brand-new dark matter experiment, scheduled to start operating in 2020. ![]() He’s in a good mood – like many other physicists here these days: in May, the scientists at SNOLAB got exciting news. It’s an almighty, and thus far unfruitful, search. SNOLAB detectors scour the cosmos for the elusive stuff thought to make up the bulk of matter in our universe: dark matter. It’s located at a depth of two kilometres – so deep you could easily stack four and a half Empire State buildings into this hole, one on top of the other. The fellow miners are actually physicists working at a massive, subterranean lab dubbed SNOLAB. Their hats are orange though, and they are mining for something completely different: nothing. But when they enter the half-open, jittery pitch-black lift to descend into the spacious cavern, they share the ride with a bunch of other hard-hatted folks. Just outside of Sudbury, Ontario, in a forest where curious bears frequently forage for raspberries in backyards, Creighton Mine workers in blue hard hats extract nickel from deep below the ground. There’s a mine, deep underground in Canada, that’s unlike any other.
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