LBNL: Hunting for Dark Matter’s ‘Hidden Valley’

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LBNL: Hunting for Dark Matter’s ‘Hidden Valley’

Post by bystander » Tue May 24, 2016 6:57 pm

Hunting for Dark Matter’s ‘Hidden Valley’
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory | 2016 May 24

Berkeley Lab’s Kathryn Zurek wants to make sure we’re looking in the right places.

Kathryn Zurek realized a decade ago that we may be searching in the wrong places for clues to one of the universe’s greatest unsolved mysteries: dark matter. Despite making up an estimated 85 percent of the total mass of the universe, we haven’t yet figured out what it’s made of. ...

Physicist and author Alan Lightman has described dark matter as an “invisible elephant in the room”—you know it’s there because of the dent it’s making in the floorboards but you can’t see or touch it. Likewise, physicists can infer that dark matter exists in huge supply compared to normal matter because of its gravitational effects, which far exceed those expected from the matter we can see in space. ...

While there have been some candidate signals and hints, and numerous experiments have narrowed the range of energies and masses at which we are now looking for dark matter particles, the scientific community hasn’t yet embraced a dark matter discovery. ...

Some of the scientifically popular hypothetical particle candidates for dark matter are WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) and axions (very-low-mass particles). But the possibility of a rich and overlooked mix of light particles was compelling for Zurek, who began to construct models to test out the theory. ...

On an afternoon in late April, Zurek and her student Katelin Schutz sat together waiting to press the button to submit a new paper on a proposal to tease out a signal for light dark matter particles using an exotic, supercooled liquid known as superfluid helium. In the paper, they explain how this form of helium can probe for signals of “super light dark matter,” with an energy signature well below the reach of today’s experiments. ...

Most popular theories of WIMPs suggest a mass around 100 times the mass of a proton, a particle found at an atom’s core, for example, but a superfluid helium detector could be sensitive to masses many orders of magnitude smaller ...

On the Detectability of Light Dark Matter with Superfluid Helium - Katelin Schutz, Kathryn M. Zurek
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk.
— Garrison Keillor

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