https://www.iflscience.com/physics/next ... er-before/
And you can bet they involve lots of money, because that another thing where bigger is better as far as mainstream astrophysicists are concerned is how much the detector costs. It's money in their pocket. And what do they have in store for everyone in their gnome hunt? Well read on ...Next-Generation Dark Matter Detectors Will Study The Universe Like Never Before
Bigger doesn’t always mean better but certain physics detectors could be the exception that confirms the rule. Especially if the goal is to detect elusive particles such as neutrinos or hypothetical particles such as dark matter. To that end, there have been some recent exciting developments.
And here is their announcement …The DARWIN and LUX-ZEPLIN collaborations, which run the biggest experiments focusing on discovering dark matter, have just announced they have united to build a new, GIANT next-generation detector.
https://www.sanfordlab.org/press-releas ... r-detector
So … they haven’t even got results back from their last set of expensive, multi-million dollar detectors and already their eyes are moving on to the next one. Here’s what Luca Grandi, Primary Investigator of the XENON/DARWIN projects says about it … “It is an exciting period for us with both XENONnT and LZ expected to release first data by the end of the year. A larger detector will be essential in both scenarios that we have in front of us. If we see a hint of dark matter in our current experiments it will be needed to further characterize its origin. If we do not, it will allow to continue to explore new territory where dark matter might still be hiding.” Richard Gaitskell, another member of the LUX-ZEPLIN team says “If we see a dark matter signal using our 10-ton detectors, we will then need a much larger detector to accurately determine the properties of that elusive dark matter. … If we see nothing over the next few years with the 10-ton detectors, we will need the much larger detector to probe additional hiding places of the dark matter. The work on the research and design for the new even more massive next-generation detector has begun.”The current xenon-based experiments XENONnT and LUX-ZEPLIN will start their first science runs in 2021, to lead the race to detect the first signs of new particles and interactions. These experiments employ 5.9 and 7.0 tonnes of liquid xenon for the search, respectively.
… snip …
The new multi-tonne liquid xenon detector will combine the most successful technologies employed in rare-event searches with xenon detectors, including those developed for XENONnT and LUX-ZEPLIN, and from targeted R&D including that supported under DARWIN.
How exciting! And they clearly have all their bases covered, don’t they? They plan on getting their new, GIANT detector no matter what happens? Not clear if it’s going to be called DARWIN still ... or something else. But in any case, it’s going to be “multi-tonne”. That’s pretty vague. What aren’t they telling folks? The cost, perhaps? Remember that Darwin was supposed to have 50 tonnes of xenon … just about the world’s annual production of the stuff … and cost between $116 million and $174 million. Are they planning something now that’s even bigger than that and just not saying it? They know how the public loves surprises. Only time will tell. But the beauty of their scheme is that when Darwin or whatever the next generation GIANT detector is called fails to find anything (as I predict), they can still come back and justify an even GIANTER detector using the same logic. Isn't mainstream *science* fun? Just saying …