New Experiment Torpedoes Lightweight Dark Matter

摘要

It's not the result physicists were hoping for, but data from a new experiment may put an end to a contentious subplot in the search for dark matter, the mysterious stuff whose gravity binds the galaxies. This week, researchers working with the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) detector at the San-ford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota, announced that they see no signs of the lightweight dark matter particles hinted at by other experiments. "It's a significant miss," says Richard Gaitskell, a LUX team member from Brown University. "We should have seen hundreds or thousands of events and we simply don't see any."