Why isn’t that convenient. Then they won’t have to admit they were wrong.A ‘Neutrino Fog’ Is Starting to Cloud the Search for Dark Matter
The decades-long search for dark matter could ultimately end in an impasse.
.In the hopes of detecting rare collisions between supposed dark matter particles and atomic nuclei, physicists have built increasingly large detectors that pick up on faint signals and have buried them deep underground, far away from cosmic rays and most forms of interference. Now the detectors have picked up on something else altogether: solar neutrinos, tiny, ghostly particles which sail through normal matter and may mask dark matter signals
So we paid for the better detectors that astronomers promised would prove DM exists, and now they say the detectors are picking up neutrinos making that impossible?
“Exact same”? What a coincidence.The neutrino fog arises from a fateful cosmic coincidence. The thermonuclear fusion reactions that allow our sun to shine also churn out fast-moving and featherweight neutrinos that can strike xenon nuclei with the exact same momentum that has been predicted for much slower and heavier hypothetical particles of dark matter.
Well, darn. So … no DM detected. Check.“The events are indistinguishable one at a time, but [in aggregate], the expected neutrino flux has a different spectral shape than [what’s predicted by] many dark matter models,” Morå says, explaining how both teams flagged the fog in the first place. Additionally, the number of candidate collisions observed by both projects was consistent with forecasts based on well-established solar physics, bolstering the case that the events were linked to solar neutrinos rather than some unexpected variety of dark matter.
Desperately looking for a silver lining in a null result?Over the past four decades, generations of dark matter detectors have worked to “see nothing but better,” says Ciaran O’Hare, a dark matter researcher at the University of Sydney. “Now we’re moving into a new era where these detectors can actually do some valuable discovery science, although it’s the kind of science that [might] prevent them from doing what they were initially built to do.”
Thank God! For a minute there, I got worried the money that's paying for so many mortgages, educations, and vacations was going to stop tomorrow.The neutrino fog is not currently stifling the search for dark matter, nor is it expected to in the next generation of detectors. … snip … Progress will likely not be stymied by neutrinos until after 10 to 15 years.
Wait! They didn’t mention that when the current detectors were funded.In theory, current detectors could begin identifying subtle distinctions between neutrino signals and dark matter signals if they collected thousands of additional data points. Yet doing so would require resources both teams lack.
Can you hear it? K’Ching? K’Ching?Over two years, the XENONnT detector sensed around 40 neutrinos, and PandaX-4T sensed around 75. To “power through the fog,” O’Hare says, the researchers would need to build a detector that was 100 times larger or run an experiment that was 100 times longer.
I knew it. They're begging for money.Such a device would likely require several years of development, however. Building a sufficiently sensitive and accurate detector is already challenging as is, Carew points out, without adding on extra capabilities.
Of course it will, there’s too much money to be made.If dark matter detectors do succumb to the fog, scientists could repurpose the instruments to study neutrinos. ... snip ... “The physics opportunities for the next generation PandaX are much richer than just dark matter search,” members of the team told Scientific American.
Aided by xenon-based tools or not, the search for dark matter particles will likely endure.
Well, how convenient is that?“It’s possible that nature gave us this particle which doesn’t do anything other than [help] form galaxies,” he says.
K’Ching K’Ching K’Ching K’Ching K’Ching!“But we would never know unless we tried everything.”