In a mile-deep former gold mine, inside a titanium tank filled with a rare liquefied gas, scientists began the search for what has yet to be found: dark matter.
Scientists believe that invisible material makes up most of the mass in the universe and say we wouldn’t be here without it, but they don’t know what it is.
The race to solve this great mystery has taken a team to the depths of Lead, South Dakota. The question for scientists is a basic one, says Kevin Lesko, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: “What is this big place that I live in? Right now, 95% is a mystery.”
the idea is that a mile of dirt and rock, a giant tank, a second tank and the purest titanium in the world block almost all cosmic rays and particles that circulate — and cross — all of us every day. However, dark matter particles, scientists believe, can avoid all these obstacles.
Scientists hope that something will fly into the tank of liquid xenon in the internal tank and collide with a nucleus of an atom of xenon (a chemical element) like two balls in a game of billiards, revealing its existence in a flash of light seen by a device called a “time projection camera.”
Scientists announced Thursday that the five-year, $60 million investigation It finally started two months ago, after a delay caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, but so far the device has detected nothing, or at least no dark matter. The team appears to be working to filter out most of the background radiation they hoped to block out.
To look for this very rare type of interaction, job number one is to get rid of all the common sources of radiation first, which would overwhelm the experiment,” said Carter Hall, a physicist at the University of Maryland.
If all the calculations and theories are correct, the team of 250 scientists believes that they will only see a few fleeting signs of dark matter per year, and estimate that they will obtain 20 times more data in the next two years.
When the experiment ends, the probability of finding dark matter with this device is “probably less than 50%, but greater than 10%”.Hugh Lippincott, a physicist and spokesman for the experiment, said Thursday at a press conference.
Although far from a certainty, “it takes a little bit of enthusiasm,” said Lawrence Berkeley’s Lesko. “You don’t go into weird physics research without some hope of finding something.”
Source: Observadora
