More bad news for DM enthusiasts …

[BeAChooser]

https://gizmodo.com/a-famous-dark-matte ... 1848032577

A Famous Dark Matter Signal Is Probably Coming From Something Else

An underground experiment in South Korea has turned up nothing, suggesting an intriguing observation from 2017 was a red herring.

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The experiment that purportedly detected a WIMP signal in 2017 is the DAMA/LIBRA experiment. DAMA/LIBRA uses sodium iodide crystals as targets for dark matter; the idea is that if dark matter passes through the crystals, they’ll get excited and become a little brighter. Other experiments that search for WIMPs by other means, like the XENON1T in Italy and XMASS-I in Japan, have not been able to find the signal that DAMA/LIBRA is seeing

Enter the COSINE-100 experiment, which is based in a laboratory 2,300 feet underground in South Korea. COSINE-100 uses over 200 pounds of the same sodium iodide target, making it a good mimic of DAMA/LIBRA. COSINE-100 has been looking for a WIMP signal since 2016. Its first search turned up zilch. Its next search, the results of which are published today in Science Advances, ran from October 2016 through July 2018. The COSINE-100 team reported that they found just as little as they did last time, which could mean the end of the road for the controversial DAMA/LIBRA results.

That just means they'll dream up some other half-assed notion to waste money one.

[BeAChooser]

https://www.science.org/content/article ... tter-claim

Is the end in sight for famous dark matter claim?

The drama of the world’s most controversial dark matter claim may have reached its last act, if not its final scene. For 2 decades, physicists with an experiment called DAMA have claimed that particles of dark matter—the unseen stuff whose gravity appears to bind our galaxy—are bumping into atomic nuclei in their subterranean particle detector, even as other dark matter hunts come up empty. Now, physicists with a detector called COSINE-100, designed to mimic DAMA, present the most direct refutation yet of the findings. And in 2020, theorists identified a way in which the DAMA signal could have arisen inadvertently in the team’s analysis.

The DAMA team rejects both claims. Rita Bernabei, a physicist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and DAMA’s leader, declined to be interviewed. But she dismissed the new explanation in an email: “We have already demonstrated that the assumptions there reported are untenable and the conclusions are worthless.”

They have to reject it, folks. Too many livelihoods depend on it.

Especially Rita Bernabei's. She's been feeding from the DM trough for over 20 years.

[Michael Mozina]

The problem with DM experiments is that they could never actually "falsify" the whole concept of exotic forms of matter, just one or a few of them at worst case, and in most instances, not even one.

[BeAChooser]

The problem with DM experiments is that they could never actually "falsify" the whole concept of exotic forms of matter

I suspect that wasn't their intent. Not if your real interest is in milking the poor taxpayers for all that they're worth.

[BeAChooser]

This looks like the nail in this coffin.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586- ... f-45662398

Notorious dark-matter signal could be due to analysis error

Observations that physicists have so far failed to replicate could be the result of misinterpreted data.

Physicists have shown that an underground experiment in South Korea can ‘see’ dark matter streaming through Earth — or not, depending on how its data are sliced. The results cast further doubt on a decades-old claim that another experiment has been detecting the mysterious substance.

The latest study, published on the arXiv preprint server on 10 August1, reports that a certain type of data analysis by the COSINE-100 detector can produce seasonal fluctuations in the results. Physicists had proposed a similar fluctuation as a signature of dark matter, the invisible but pervasive stuff thought to be five times more abundant in the Universe than ordinary matter.

“If you apply the wrong method, you can see a fluctuation in their data where there wasn’t one,” says Nicola Rossi, an experimental particle physicist at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L’Aquila, Italy, who first suggested this explanation in 2020.

[BeAChooser]

More info on that nail and coffin …

https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/phys ... republish/

The only underground lab in the Southern Hemisphere is nearly ready to go.

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“We’re pushing the boundaries for what you can do for a scientific instrument, as well as a new type of scientific lab in Australia,” says Phillip Urquijo, a technical coordinator of SABRE

… snip …

The DAMA/LIBRA experiment, set up in a large underground lab underneath the mountain Gran Sasso in Italy, has been recording a significant signal for 20 years now.

… snip …

This is what the DAMA/LIBRA team has found: an annual modulation signal. Even more impressively, they’ve managed to confirm it to a high degree of confidence for almost two decades. But so far, no other detectors have been able to find this same signal. There could be a number of reasons for this. 

One suggestion is that instead of the annual modulation signal of the Earth moving around the Sun, it is instead a seasonal change caused by something else entirely. This makes having a dark matter detector on the other side of the world incredibly handy. If the SABRE team finds modulation opposite to DAMA/LIBRA, it means that what the Italian team is seeing is seasonal variation – and it isn’t dark matter. However, if the modulations match, it would confirm that we’re able to detect dark matter.

But the SABRE team might also find no modulation at all. In the last few years, some physicists have suggested that the way that DAMA/LIBRA collects its results introduces a bias that could cause this modulation. An experiment called ANAIS in an old railway tunnel in Spain recently concluded that they could not find evidence of this annual modulation, despite adopting the same target and technique of DAMA/LIBRA. This result was described by some as the nail in the coffin of DAMA/LIBRA’s modulation. 

… snip …

Even when all the parts are in, assembled and the detector is turned on, it’ll be at least three years until we can know what they’re going to find. SABRE will just have to sit there waiting for the occasional mystery particles to come whizzing by. If we’re lucky, some of them could be dark matter. 

“What I think we’ll see is a result that rules out DAMA/LIBRA,” says Duffy. 

“What I hope we find is a result that rules in DAMA/LIBRA as a discoverer of dark matter, because the excitement and the potential value to the world would be akin to the Higgs boson discovery. Perhaps even greater.” 

First of all, precisely what value has the Higgs boson discovery been? Name something derived from it that actually impacts any of our lives in a noticeable, beneficial way? Some new device that takes advantage of it. Or some device that has now been improved because of it’s discovery? Or some additional discovery that it’s led to which impacts our lives. Something. ANYTHING. I come up blank.

Second it looks like someone is hedging their bets above (note bolding).

[BeAChooser]

Notice how "Duffy" in the above said he thinks the SABRE experiment will rule out DAMA/LIBRA ... in other words be a bust.

Well here's the next "could" by none other than "Duffy" ...

https://flipboard.com/topic/australianu ... 5%2Fnet.au

Physics is at a crossroads. Could this experiment yield a 'paradigm shift'?

In a gold mine at the edge of a rugged mountain range …
… scientists are going deep beneath the surface of the Earth …
… to unlock the secrets of the universe.
A shot in the dark

Sell it. Get the rubes to fund it. That’s what it’s all about now.

And as you can see, a lot of work went into producing the presentation on this website, home of the organizations benefiting from SABRE.

And notice towards the end where Professor Duffy (I prefer Doofus) says “the world needs to know whether they are right or wrong,” then says “if they’re right, Nobel Prizes for them, wonderful,” and finally says “If they’re wrong, then we look somewhere else”?

Either way, they win and you lose. They win because they’ll be able to keep on buying those big houses, nice cars, cool vacations, kids educations, etc that they’ve grown to expect over the last 50+ years of DM searches. You lose because YOU will pay for all that and no matter how it turns out, it won’t affect your lives in a positive way. Realistically, they aren’t going to build any devices using dark matter in your lifetime. Maybe not ever. More than likely, the only thing that "could" come out of it would be a dark matter bomb that will make earth us even less safe than particle physics has made us.

It’s also ironic that the end of the presentation, when they rhetorically ask the question “why do we need to know?” , they bring up the name Benjamin Franklin who was studying lightning and “discovered electricity.” It’s ironic because lightning is a electrically charged plasma phenomena … part of the Electric Universe which all the dark matter *experts* ignore or defame. Just saying ...

[BeAChooser]

https://www.expressandstar.com/news/voi ... er-matter/

Peter Rhodes on … snip … does dark matter matter?

… snip …

One kilometre deep beneath the Australian town of Stawell, scientists are hunting for dark matter, a mysterious substance so vital to the universe and to every living creature that, according to research I just made up, 99.99999999 per cent of humans don't give a flying fig about it.

Intriguingly, the list of things banned from Oz's super-sterile and light-proof laboratory includes bananas, on the grounds that they are “slightly radioactive”. Bananas also happen to be one of nature's finest heart-helping, gut-soothing, mood-calming, energy-boosting snack foods.

The irony is that millions of us could benefit more from bananas than from pretending to understand dark matter.

LOL! Haven't I been saying that?