Mining for Dark Matter (Forwarded)
- From: Andrew Yee <ayee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:39:46 GMT
News Service
University of California-Davis
Media contact(s):
Robert Svoboda, Physics, (530) 754-9610
Mani Tripathi, Physics, (530) 752-8785
Andy Fell, UC Davis News Service, (530) 752-4533
April 23, 2008
Mining for Dark Matter
While much of the attention in the world of high-energy physics is focused
on the Large Hadron Collider nearing completion at the European Center for
Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland, other physicists,
including some from UC Davis, are working on a much lower-budget
experiment that will sit in an abandoned South Dakota goldmine.
The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy recently
approved $1.2 million in funding for the LUX (Large Underground Xenon)
detector, about half the cost of the project. LUX will look for evidence
of particles of dark matter, thought to make up a quarter of the content
of the universe.
"LUX is not so much rocket science as about being very careful," said
Robert Svoboda, a physics professor at UC Davis who with Professor Mani
Tripathi is a co-investigator on the project. "We're dealing with very low
energies where events are very hard to see."
The detector will consist of about 600 pounds of liquid xenon suspended in
a 25-foot-high tank of extremely pure water, located 4,800 feet
underground in the Homestake mine near Lead, S.D. If dark matter particles
called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) exist, then they
should occasionally bump into the nucleus of a xenon atom and give off a
flash of light.
For physicists, detecting dark matter "would be the biggest deal since
finding antimatter in the 1930s," Tripathi said.
The deep-mine location and the water tank are designed to block radiation
that would interfere with detecting the rare, low-energy events. The
researchers are testing everything down to the epoxy glue to remove the
smallest traces of radiation.
"This will be one of the least radioactive places on Earth," Svoboda said.
The mine closed in 2000. In 2004, the state legislature created the South
Dakota Science and Technology Authority to develop the mine as an
underground laboratory, and in 2007 the National Science Foundation
selected the mine as the site for a national Deep Underground Science and
Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). LUX will be the first major experiment
installed at the site.
Water is currently being pumped out of the mine, and the researchers hope
to begin assembling the experiment in late summer or fall this year.
Other funds are being provided by the state of South Dakota and from the
institutions collaborating on the experiment, which include Case Western
Reserve University, Brown University, the Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence
Berkeley national laboratories, the University of Maryland, Texas A&M, and
the University of Rochester.
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Mining for Dark Matter (Forwarded)
- From: gb6724@xxxxxxxxx
- Re: Mining for Dark Matter (Forwarded)
- Prev by Date: Refining the date of dinosaur extinction (Forwarded)
- Next by Date: Re: Plan to identify watery earth-like planets develops (Forwarded)
- Previous by thread: Refining the date of dinosaur extinction (Forwarded)
- Next by thread: Re: Mining for Dark Matter (Forwarded)
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
