The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search

Couldn't find this arty using the search, but I found it fairly interesting and it's relatively contemporary.

www.sciencedaily.com...

Physicists Search For Dark Matter Deep In Minnesota Mine
ScienceDaily (Mar. 6, 2008) — A half-mile down in an old iron ore mine in Minnesota, incredibly sensitive detectors have been waiting for a particle of dark matter, an invisible substance that may form the skeleton of galaxies, to make itself known.

Last thing I'd expect to find at the bottom of an old mine is a research project looking for dark matter.
I like the alternative name for dark matter too: WIMPs
Sorta reminds me of the project looking for gravitational waves caused by exploding stars using a super long laser sensor array.

reply to post by 4N6310

WIMPs are leading candidates for dark matter, the unseen stuff that accounts for 85 percent of the entire mass of the universe. Billions of WIMPs may be passing unnoticed through the bodies of humans every second.

Wouldn't it be a good idea to ask miners?


The search for neutrinos takes place in old mine domes filled with water and array of detectors.

This WIMP business is really strange. If the particles may be passing through our bodies by billions a sec, then one would expect that the hunters would score with the device they got. But they came empty-handed.

So the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, which started out in an underground tunnel at Stanford before moving to the Soudan mine in Minnesota, will next move to a deeper site at Snolab in Canada. The detectors will grow from 3.7 kilos of germanium to 25 kilos.

With a larger detector, as with a wider telescope, "You will be able to see things you've never been able to see before," Cabrera said.

Maybe if the amount of germanium gets increased to equal the average weight of a human body, the billions of WIMPS will show up.


My bet is that the researchers won't find anything in the allotted time to make WIMP look like it was imagined.

Ah, all those cosmic particles . . . I always wondered where all the itching come from.


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[edit on 31/10/08 by Jbird]

Sure, if I knew any miners.
1 kilo = 2.2 lbs so 50 x 2.2 = 110 lbs
I guess that's about the weight of an adult...with bullemia or anorexia.
I am sure it's a more dificult task than I am making it sound like. Apparently they've done some fine work on the instrumentation, so good for them.
I am skeptical they'll find any WIMPs, though, if they haven't already going by their estimation of how often we're nailed by these little guys.

I do, however, remember reading about how astronauts are regularly pierced by super high energy particles at times while in orbit. Talk about sketchy, man. How'd you like knowing at any time, a visible particle could go flying right through you at any time?

At any rate, good luck finding the WIMPs, guys.

This would be an interesting experiment, if dark matter was real!!!!!