New Dark Matter Detector Will Be 100 Times More Sensitive to Dark Matter

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New Dark Matter Detector Will Be 100 Times More Sensitive to Dark Matter

Hunting for Dark Matter in a Gold Mine
The dark-matter detector Lux in the Davis chamber of the old Homestake mine in South Dakota. The chamber is named for Raymond Davis, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002 for an experiment housed in the same chamber that detected neutrinos generated by the sun.
A team of scientists is building a supersized version of the dark matter detector Lux, called Lux-Zeplin, which will be roughly 100 times more sensitive to dark matter than its predecessor.

“What really impressed me was the trip down,” said astrophysicist James Buckley, PhD, speaking of the vertical mile he traveled to get to the site of an underground dark-matter experiment. “You can see you’re moving at a pretty good clip, which, by the way, is three times slower than the cage used to drop when it was a mine. It took us 10 minutes to get down a mile. You just watch the earth flashing by and every once in a while you go past a boarded up tunnel.”

The mine is the Homestake Mine, a played-out gold mine in Lead, South Dakota, that has been converted into a warren of underground chambers housing physics experiments that need to be shielded from cosmic radiation.

One of these experiments is the Lux detector, designed to detect WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles). WIMPs are hypothetical subatomic particles thought to make up dark matter in much the same way that electrons and quarks make up ordinary matter. But compared to other particles, WIMPs are elusive and interact only rarely with ordinary matter, and so far Lux hasn’t found any.

Buckley, a professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is a co-investigator on a team building a supersized version of Lux, called Lux-Zeplin, that will be roughly 100 times more sensitive to dark matter than its predecessor. Lux-Zeplin and two other dark-matter experiments survived a stringent “downselection” of competing dark-matter experiments and received Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation funding this July.

An enormous vat of xenon
The problem with finding WIMPs is not that they are rare, but that they rarely interact with ordinary matter. “A billion dark matter particles go through you every second, but you’d have to wait a thousand years for one of them to interact with you,” Buckley said.

The detector is essentially a huge vat of liquid xenon, a meter and a half tall and a meter and a half across.” The idea is that rare collisions between WIMPs and the nuclei of the xenon atoms will leave detectable signatures in the form of sequential light signals (see illustration below)…..MORE HERE

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New Dark Matter Detector Will Be 100 Times More Sensitive to Dark Matter