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Some Meeting Required: Scientists Piece Collectively The Largest U.S.-Based mostly Darkish Matter Experiment – Berkeley  Lab By way of Symmetry Journal

One of many a number of 800 pound gorillas within the room of contemporary physics (and cosmology) is that this: about 85% of the matter within the Universe, consists of particles about which we all know nothing and can’t detect (thus far). The existence of darkish matter has been inferred not directly, from gravitational proof – the existence of some type of matter which solely interacts with odd, or baryonic, matter, by way of gravity (and not one of the different recognized types of particle interplay) is the one accepted rationalization for the dynamic habits of galaxies, as an illustration. However nobody is aware of what the damned stuff is.
 

For sure, scientists wish to do one thing about this lamentable state of affairs, and practically a mile underground, an experiment is being assembled – the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment – which hopes to detect a doable sort of darkish matter: WIMPs, or Weakly Interacting Large Particles. On the core of the detector is a container full of ten tons of liquid xenon, surrounded by a fair bigger tank full of a fluid designed to detect and weed out neutrinos – ghostly particles which additionally work together very weakly with different particles, and which may mimic the presence of a WIMP. The detector, which sits below practically a mile of stable rock, below the arid hills of South Dakota, is described in a current story from the Lawrence Berkeley Nationwide Laboratory (we discovered it by means of Symmetry Journal), and if you happen to’re eager about ultra-sensitive, precision engineering, you may discover it fascinating.

– Jack Forster, Editor-In-Chief