Dark matter does not see the xenon - BBC

Physicists reported the first results of the newest American underground detector, designed to catch the mysterious dark matter particles. The first three months of operation showed that the unit did not find anything.

Physics Laboratory Sanford, working with the installation of LUX, the most sensitive detector for today WIMP – a hypothetical dark matter particles, announced the results of the first session of a three-month search. After several failures and dubious luck on less sensitive detectors all been waiting for these results with great hope and anticipation. Waiting to see what will now finally caught the strange WIMPs, so out of the trap they can not escape …

Gone. During the three months of any dark particles LUX did not record.

«Of course, the variation of fundamental constants – nonsense»

Russian physicist Mikhail Kozlov, said in an interview, “the Newspaper”, as far as can be fickle world of physical constants and … ?

Moreover, disavowed three previously registered “events” that could be the result of a collision with a WIMP particle of ordinary matter. Senfordskie physicists call these events case of “mistaken identity.” According to them, if it really were the traces left by dark matter, LUX would have discovered more than a thousand such events.

«We did not find anything – said Yale physicist Daniel McKinsey, a member of the collaboration LUX, with humor and added: – We spotted this” nothing “is much better than the other».

about dark matter is known today about the same – nothing. In addition, it manifests itself by the gravitational attraction and is approximately 20% of the total density of the universe. The most logical assumption that its structure – it WIMPs (wimps, or weakly interacting massive particles), the particle mass, and endowed with the so-called weak interaction. Since particles of normal matter, they do not interact and express themselves can only under very rare head-on collision with them.

red-faced and cute

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These clashes and called to register the tool LUX (Large Underground Xenon), located in an abandoned gold mine at a depth of five hundred kilometers.

completely shielded from cosmic rays, this detector is a hundred times more sensitive than any existing.

In the collaboration of physicists working with LUX, representatives of two dozen universities and research institutions in the U.S., Britain and Portugal. Construction of the detector was completed at the beginning of this year, and in the spring he finally started trying to record the particles of dark matter. And while no one has registered.

Physicists

null result is not discouraged. “This is just the beginning – says McKinsey. – We will continue to set the data. ” According to the plans LUX will run for two years, and then give way to a more sensitive detector LUX-ZEPLIN, or just LZ. WIMP target becomes one third ODP xenon like LUX, and seven tons, increase detection sensitivity is not one, but a thousand times compared with existing.

Galaxy – the house, the dark matter – “barabashka»

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Thus, the race for the mysterious particles continues. Zero result searches makes physicists are increasingly ask: “Was there a boy? Maybe it’s the boy was not? »

For example, last year, Pavel Kroupa, an astrophysicist at the University of Bonn, recalled , that the standard cosmological model requires the fulfillment of the so-called the duality theorem of dwarf galaxies. According to this theorem, in the universe there must be two types of dwarf galaxies – the ones that were originally contained a large amount of dark matter, and those in which it was at first.

These galaxies, says Kroupa, should differ in shape, and if galaxies without dark matter form should be challenging, the galaxy’s dark matter must have a shape close to the ball. Meanwhile, surrounded by the Milky Way globular dwarf galaxies were found. So, either the duality theorem is false, or the dark matter does not exist. However, Professor Kroupa immediately made a reservation: that there may be other theoretical explanations for this discrepancy, the more so because so far, he said, the main problems of inflationary cosmology, including the Big Bang, remain unresolved.