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China's PandaX Project Looks For Dark Matter In the Heart of a Marble Mountain
the_newsbeagle writes "Chinese engineers love their superlatives: Biggest dam, fastest train, etc etc. Now they've constructed the deepest underground dark matter detector beneath a mountain in Sichuan province. Such dark matter seekers have to be buried deep to shield them from cosmic rays, because that radiation would be picked up by the detector and could be confused for radiation generated by dark matter. Other dark matter detectors are similarly subterranean: LUX, in the United States, is at the bottom of an abandoned mine in South Dakota, and a European effort called XENON lies below the Gran Sasso mountain. The Chinese researchers hope their PandaX detector will finally reveal the much-hypothesized, never-seen dark matter particles known as WIMPs."
Actually, XENON isn't a European project, it's an international collaboration with leadership in the United States and members in Europe and China. The device is in Europe, but that's sort of incidental. Here's the membership: XENON-100
We're talking about that one decimal place before the decimal point: current observations indicate more than five times as much dark matter as known matter. It's not just a little bit of round-off error in how much dust there is between stars, but apparently most of the stuff in the universe (at least, before you get to "dark energy," which is "twice as big" again, but far more poorly understood).
In case anyone was wondering, WIMPs are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.