https://www.sciencenews.org/article/win ... ty-physics
So we might have commercial fusion (wink, wink) before this project yields any results. And already 20 physicists are working on it,The Windchime experiment could use gravity to hunt for dark matter ‘wind’
The secret to directly detecting dark matter might be blowin’ in the wind.
The mysterious substance continues to elude scientists even though it outweighs visible matter in the universe by about 8 to 1. All laboratory attempts to directly detect dark matter — seen only indirectly by the effect its gravity has on the motions of stars and galaxies — have gone unfulfilled.
Those attempts have relied on the hope that dark matter has at least some other interaction with ordinary matter in addition to gravity (SN: 10/25/16). But a proposed experiment called Windchime, though decades from being realized, will try something new: It will search for dark matter using the only force it is guaranteed to feel — gravity.
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The Windchime detector is based on the notion that a collection of pendulums will swing in a breeze. In the case of backyard wind chimes, it might be metal rods or dangling bells that jingle in moving air. For the dark matter detector, the pendulums are arrays of minute, ultrasensitive detectors that will be jostled by the gravitational forces they feel from passing bits of dark matter. Instead of air molecules bouncing off metal chimes, the gravitational attraction of the particles that make up the dark matter wind would cause distinctive ripples as it blows through a billion or so sensors in a box measuring about a meter per side.
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“You’re looking for dark matter to [cause] a gravitational signal in the sensor,” says Carney, of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “And you just ask . . . could I possibly see this gravitational signal? When you first make the estimate, the answer is no. It’s actually going to be infeasibly difficult.”
That didn’t stop Carney and a small group of colleagues from exploring the idea anyway in 2020. “Thirty years ago, this would have been totally nuts to propose,” he says. “It’s still kind of nuts, but it’s like borderline insanity.”
The Windchime Project collaboration has since grown to include 20 physicists. They have a prototype Windchime built of commercial accelerometers and are using it to develop the software and analysis that will lead to the final version of the detector, but it’s a far cry from the ultimate design. Carney estimates that it could take another few decades to develop sensors good enough to measure gravity even from heavy dark matter.
Wait! Haven't we been told over and over that negative results from experiments have been *progress* because they were ruling out some type of DM? Are these guys now saying that those guys have been lying to us all along? Surely not!Even in its final form, Windchime will be sensitive only to dark matter bits that are roughly the mass of a fine speck of dust. That’s enormous on the spectrum of known particles — more than a million trillion times the mass of a proton
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But if it never detects anything at all, the experiment still stands out from other dark matter detection schemes, says Dan Hooper, a physicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., also not affiliated with the project. That’s because it would be the first experiment that could entirely rule out some types of dark matter.
Here's more on the effort: https://www.physics.purdue.edu/windchime/, including the faces of the 20 *scientists* apparently mentioned above. Note the little blurb at the bottom: "Our work is supported by the Department of Energy, the Quantum Science Center, the Purdue Quantum Science and Engineering Institute, Oak Ridge National Lab, Fermilab, and Citizen Scientists like you.". Notice how they try to make you feel like you're part of the effort. The reality is you're only paying for it ... all of it because ALL of those other entities listed before you are funded by taxpayers as well. So in reality you are the ONLY ONES really "supporting" this effort. No wonder all the *scientists* in all these organization are smiling. Do a search and you'll find there are a lot more than those 20 faces involved in this. And you have no say over all that money going to them. NONE. Because that's the way modern *science* works ... be it dark matter, Covid-19, Climate Change or fusion.