Well, shucks. So all that time and money has been … wasted?Identifying dark matter
The international conference series on the identification of dark matter (IDM) was brought to life in 1996 with the motto that “it is of critical importance now not just to pursue further evidence for its existence but rather to identify what the dark matter is.” Despite earnest attempts to identify what dark matter comprises, the answer to this question remains elusive.
Really? And yet you folks just can’t seem to find it. Maybe it’s time to reexamine your assumptions? Maybe there is some other factor … like ... perhaps .... electromagnetic effects on plasma … that you’re overlooking?Today, the evidence for dark matter is overwhelming
EXCEPT electomagnetic effects on plasma. Just saying …IDM2022 illuminated the dark-matter mystery from all angles, ranging from cosmological evidence via astrophysics to possible dark-matter particle candidates and their detection via indirect searches, direct searches and colliders.
So, there have been fourteen of these boondoggles, eh? And how much money did Big Science waste on them? Can’t be cheap to house and entertain 250 physicists for several days every year in fancy resort around the world. And, obviously, such collaboration didn’t solve the problem of finding DM. So tell us ... do you really expect anything different next time? Are you infected by Hopium?The 14th edition of IDM took place in Vienna, Austria, from 18 to 22 July, attracting about 250 physicists and more than 200 contributions.
None of which include the actual detection of DM. So tell us, when do you folks decide you can’t find DM because it simply isn’t there? Do tax payers have to pay you to search EVERY possible DM particle mass range first? Can that ever do actually done?Tremendous progress in the sensitivity of direct detection experiments has been achieved in the past few decades over a wide dark-matter particle mass range. … snip … While in the past, direct searches focused on the classical WIMP region in a mass between a few GeV and several TeV, the search region is now enlarged towards even lighter dark-matter particles down to the keV region.
Yes, another claimed detection was just shot down. But the Identification of Dark Matter Conference refuses to give up on it’s cash cow. No, it’s their job to spread Hopium and keep the business of Big Science alive and well. So as the article pointes out, IDM keeps holding “EXCESS” workshops and they mention that “The direct detection experiment DAMA has observed a statistically significant signal of an annual modulated event rate for several years. This observation is consistent with Earth moving through the dark-matter halo, but has not been confirmed by any other experiment.”For GeV WIMP dark-matter searches, the XENON collaboration displayed the first results from their latest setup, XENONnT, which has a significantly lower background level and recently eliminated a previously seen excess in XENON1T.
But there’s more to the DAMA situation than just not being confirmed. The signal has been seen for 20 years by DAMA but do a search of “DAMA dark matter signal” and you get one mainstream article after another suggesting it’s NOT DM but noise. According to an article by Ethan Seigel in 2021 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswith ... 0a91fc3e5c ), other experiments that are far more sensitive — including SuperCDMS, XENON, Edelweiss, and LUX — have not been able to find DM. And an independent team, ANIAS, carried out an identical experiment to DAMA and ruled out DM being the source of the signal to better than 99% confidence. Siegel notes that an error in the analysis methodology was discovered which could account for the signal. Even Siegel, ever full of Hopium, was forced to conclude that “The world’s most controversial dark matter experiment has been busted”.
Seigel also pointed out something else … a fact that reeks of a deliberate scam by the DAMA team. He points out that the DAMA team has been “sitting on two decades of information”, refusing “to make their data, pipeline and analysis public.” But somehow, in 2020, “it was uncovered that one of the things the DAMA collaboration is doing is subtracting out their average noise value on a year-by-year basis from the data, and working with just the residuals: what’s left over when you subtract out the average.” And as Seigel demonstrates in the article, “this could lead to disaster: seeing a signal where there is none.” And that appears to be what happened. In fact, NATURE magazine, in August of this year, published an article suggesting that the “notorious dark-matter signal could be due to analysis error.” OUCH!
Yet, here are the IDM folks still suggesting the DAMA signal might be real. Why? Because they're probably already planning next year’s conference, IDM2023. See how the business of Big Science works, folks? The business of Big Science is about MAKING MONEY.