Most Sensitive Detector Yet Fails To Find Any Signs of Dark Matter

ananyo writes "A U.S. team that claims to have built the world's most sensitive dark matter detector has completed its first data run without seeing any sign of the stuff. In a webcast presentation today at the Sanford Underground Laboratory in Lead, South Dakota, physicists working on the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment said they had seen nothing statistically compelling in 110 days of data-taking. 'We find absolutely no events consistent with any kind of dark matter,' says LUX co-spokesman Rick Gaitskell, a physicist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Physicists know from astronomical observations that 85% of the Universe's matter is dark, making itself known only through its gravitational pull on conventional matter. Some think it may also engage in weak but detectable collisions with ordinary matter, and several direct detection experiments have reported tantalizing hints of these candidate dark matter particles, known as WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). Gaitskell says that it is now overwhelmingly likely that earlier sightings were statistical fluctuations. Despite the no-shows at XENON-100 and LUX, Laura Baudis, a physicist on XENON-100 at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, says physicists are not ready to give up on the idea of detecting WIMPs. They may simply have a lower mass, or may be more weakly interacting than originally hoped. 'We have some way to go,' she says."

Comments

Maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's just not there.
Dark matter always reminds of the 18th century hypothesis of the aether.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether

Same principle. Same made up matter that no one can see or detect but somehow fills the entire universe.

Re:Maybe

[icebike]

True, even failed theories advance science in some way or other.
However at some point you have to let them go.

The summary where it clearly states:

Physicists know from astronomical observations that 85% of the Universe's matter is dark,

I suggest they KNOW no such thing, and merely postulate dark matter to get their equations to balance. But how many such equation balancing inventions are laying in the dustbin of Physicists' revised theories over the years?

Unless or until the Physicists can find fault with the detectors, all of which have failed to find a trace of something allegedly composing 85% of the universe , it would seem that the whole "dark matter is known to exist" statement needs to taken down a notch. Detectors designed to their own specs fail to produce a single trace. It doesn't matter that there are very precise measurements of exactly how much the equations are out of balance.