The Hardware That Searches For Dark Matter (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: Deep in a gold mine in South Dakota, the Large Underground Xenon experiment waits in the darkness for a tiny flash of light that signals that dark matter actually exists. So far we theorize that it does exist, and have gone to great lengths to build hardware to detect dark matter. Very cold, very pure liquid xenon sits waiting for a dark matter particle to strike the nucleus of a xenon molecule, producing a distinct pattern of photons through scintillation. An array of photomultiplier tubes detect the photons, whose pattern is processed by FPGAs on custom boards connected using HDMI. The experiment has generated a list of properties not possessed by dark matter; running for several years no evidence of the particles interacting with the xenon have been found. But when the data collection concludes this year, a much larger version of the impressive hardware will be built.

Comments

keep waiting

[slashmydots]

Not going anywhere for a while? Grab a snickers...and throw it into the large hadron collider because that will tell you more about "dark matter" than this experiment. It's a lot more likely that dark matter and dark energy are just math errors that don't take into account proper universe/space expansion and doesn't understand how gravity really works.

How long is long enough?

[Dread_ed]

If we don't find anything, how long do we keep looking? Given that it is inherently difficult to prove the existence of something that is by definition elusive, what are the chances it isn't there in the first place? Furthermore, how much looking with no results will get us a reasonable certainty of that?

Its kind of like SETI. I have seen ruminations and calculations about how long it might take for us to identify intelligent signals from the vastness of space. That's all fine, lets look. However, at some point we should be able to say we have looked enough, and if we haven't found a thing its time to let it go and rethink what we are doing. Not saying we have come near this threshold with either search yet, but it should be part of our strategy.

An open ended, never ending search for something that has no empirical evidence is downright silly. Faith and hope in something that has no evidence...well lets just say that there are many people who despise that sort of thing.