The world's most sensitive dark matter detector failed in its first experiment.

The world's most sensitive dark matter detector failed in its first experiment. The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) detector, located about 1.6 km deep in a gold mine in the state of South Dakota, failed in the first experiments to detect dark matter, which is thought to make up 6/5 of the Universe.
The 'Great Underground Xenon Experiment', located in a 265 thousand-liter water tank, is carried out in an environment free from particles and external factors as much as possible. In the experiment, which had a budget of over 10 million dollars, it was stated that the LUX device completed its first experiment, but did not find any traces of dark matter.

Saul Perlmutter, who works at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and is the winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, said, “The dark part of the Universe is one of the biggest challenges we face in physics today... We call what we are looking for in the dark region because what is behind the energy and mass in the Universe? we still don't know. "The initial data presented by LUX indicate that we are taking action to find the dark matter of the dark region."
Although dark matter is thought to cover almost the entire Universe, it is impossible to see or touch. Dark matter reveals its existence through its gravitational influence on galaxies and stars.

-65 DEGREE EXPERIMENT
Thanks to experiments carried out in the depths of the earth, scientists are able to isolate the dark matter detector from every particle except 'weakly interacting giant particles' (WIMP). "LUX hardware is installed in the quietest place in the world… This is intended to detect WIMPs that are very difficult to detect and have little interaction with matter," said Rick Gaitskell of Brown University, who took part in the LUX experiment.
According to Space.com's report, WIMPs that interact with matter in a non-gravity environment are low and high-mass, while LUX is set up to detect low-mass particles. The detector, which tried to detect WIMP for three months, did not find any traces, contrary to the predictions made in the past.

In a statement made by the LUX team, “Three WIMP events likely to occur in ultra-cold silicon detectors have been recorded in the past. For the past 3 months, it was thought that there was a probability of 80 WIMP detection in LUX every 1 minutes. However, no signal was received.”
The equipment, housed in liquid xenon, which is filled into a 65-meter titanium tank at -2 degrees Celsius, is surrounded by a rock wall and a water tank. If a WIMP interacts with a xenon atom, it emits light and electrons. Electrons emit more photons than interact. The detector records the collisions inside the tank, thus measuring the signal and parkility of the photons.

 

Source : gercekgundem

📩 03/11/2013 01:42