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Searching For Dark Matter From Deep Under an Italian Mountain
Zothecula writes "Like the Higgs Boson, dark matter is one of those things in the Universe that evidence points to, but is very difficult to pin down. A team of researchers is looking to verify the existence of this most elusive of ingredients that is thought to make up 23 percent of the Universe using powerful detectors buried deep in an Italian mountain. The DarkSide-50 project is an international collaboration between Italian, French, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Chinese institutions, as well as 17 American universities. The project team spent last (Northern hemisphere) summer assembling the detector in a laboratory deep within the Gran Sasso mountain, which is accessed via an exit off a six-mile (9.6 km) long highway tunnel in Italy."
So, they think by hiding under the mountain they can escape powerful USA regime?
How naive.
What percent of the universe does dark matter make up???
Did they mention it makes up 23% of the universe?
When the US and Italian police have problems with Mafia dons (all the evidence points to them, but it is very difficult to pin anything on them), the IRS has much more success in getting them on tax evasion.
Give the IRS something to do, and maybe enlist the NSA's help with tapping dark matter's communication channels so that the IRS can figure out where the dark matter is hiding!
To be clear, dark matter is nothing like the Higgs-Boson. The Higgs was predicted to be within a specific energy range and to decay along a specific subset of paths. The LHC was designed to reach or exceed the energy range of the Higgs and to detect its decay once it appeared. The Higgs appeared within the range predicted, decayed like predicted, and everything is fine and right with the world of predicted and accepted particle physics so far as everyone is concerned.
Dark Matter on the other hand, is something which is not predicted by any theory we currently have. Its existence is only inferred by seemingly missing mass from galaxies and some astronimical observations that suggest this mass may be in the form of seemingly invisible matter that we have no currently confirmed way of detecting other than looking at the effect it seems to have on gravity. Heck we don't even know if it is matter to begin with, at least as we know it, but that' the closest thing we can infer other than it seems to be invisible and so the name "dark matter".
Candidates of what dark matter is have been suggested. Or rather, quite vague candidates have. The most popular is the "WIMP" or "Weakly Interacting Massive Particle" that may or may not interact via the weak force at all, may have an energy/mass equivelance of who knows, and should for your guess is as good as mine not interact at all with the electromagnetic force or the strong force. Except we've built detectors, more and more of them with higher sensitivity and so far the only thing that's come back are what seems to be statistical errors.
So, really they're pretty much the opposite. Dark Matter is largely a mystery who's properties are at best hoped to be like the physics we already know and understand, and the detector mentioned hopes that this hope is correct and that it will be. The other is a particle that was predicted decades ago, had an extremely solid theoretical understanding and backing, and who's detector was build largely with the expectation that it would turn up as predicted, which it did.
might end with a "Pop"
...how refreshing is that!
We finally come to accept on slashdot that country XY is not the center of the world; thumps up, let's see more of this coming!
Dear Americano,
There are plenty of dark matters in Italy, but you'll never find out, because of the Omerta!
Yours Sincerely:
Don Vito di Corleone
Maybe they'll find Jimmy Hoffa down there, too.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The project team spent last (Northern hemisphere) summer assembling the detector in a laboratory deep within the Gran Sasso mountain, which is accessed via an exit off a six-mile (9.6 km) long highway tunnel in Italy."
So I'm assuming they have sharks with frickin' lasers to handle security...
The total mass–energy of the known universe contains 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy.
This additional gravity known as Dark Matter might be due to our Universe having more then just 3 spatial dimensions. Matter is being present somewhere there which we cannot observe directly because it is not present in our 3D realm. This means that we observe just 3D crossections of the galaxies which are existing in more then 3 dimensions. This is a direct reason for galaxies having abnormal rotation curves. Sometimes the matter arrangement in neigbouring realms is assymetrical and this is why we observe phenomena where there appears to be gravitational field in place where there is no mass (like the Bullet Cluster). This asymetry cannot be explained by existence of WIMPS.
To be accurate, the search in Gran Sasso is a search for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), which are one microphysical explanation for dark matter. I personally do not like the common conflation of dark matter (for which there is abundant evidence) with WIMPs (for which there is no evidence at all).
A lot of the interest in WIMPs comes from particle physics, due to the "WIMP miracle" (that hypothetical particles at the electro-weak scale, i.e., ~ 100 GeV, apparently have the right mass to explain dark matter) and the hypothesized connection between WIMPs and supersymmetry (i.e., that the WIMP could be a supersymmetric neutralino). After much experimental work, the WIMP miracle is almost dead experimentally, and the supposed connection to supersymmetry is not doing so well either.
However (not that you would know from reading most articles on the subject), there are a number of other viable theories for dark matter. These include axions, primordial black holes (maybe), and macroscopic quark nuggets, which would have important practical implications should they be detected.
Is this the same Gran Sasso mountain from where Benito Mussolini was rescued by Otto Skorzeny?
No thanks I'm not into BBW role play.
They delve too greedily and too deep. Who knows what they will awaken... in the darkness...
... Luminiferous aether than the Higgs Boson, but that's a minor nitpick.
... How many Polish scientists DOES it take?
That's an old latrine.
The more I read about dark matter and dark energy pervading the universe, the more I think about ether (also spelled "aether" or "æther"), which also was supposed to fill the universe. Dark matter and dark energy will never be found because they are as real as ether. See the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A....
My theory is that dark matter is actually just normal matter trapped in universes that overlay our own and whose forces, like gravity, interact with our own. My feeling is that quantum effects of sub-atomic particles that require extra dimensions in quantum mechanics are actually caused by interactions with these overlapping universes because they occupy these other universes to various extents simultaneously. I have no evidence, as I am not a physicist or an astronomer; it's just a hunch.
What do you guys think?