Particles of elusive dark matter have been discovered on Earth and will be announced on December 18. It is not yet possible to officially confirm these rumors. However, the publication of the most important experimental results on dark matter is indeed scheduled for this day
For the last 24 hours the active part of the physical community has been living by hearing. At the bottom of a 700-meter mine in the US state of Minnesota, instead of iron ore, particles of dark matter were dug up. In other words, that elusive substance was discovered on Earth that, judging by astronomical observations, makes up most of the Universe, but at the same time it almost does not interact in any way with ordinary atoms that make up stars, planets and ourselves.
Experiment
Search by ear
The CDMS is a set of multiple racks of silicon and germanium discs that are kept at just 0.04 ° C above absolute zero. There is a pair of detectors on the surfaces of the disks. One of them records very weak sound vibrations that can give rise to impacts of dark matter particles on the nuclei of silicon or germanium. The other measures the charge of particles that are knocked out of the nucleus by such interactions.
Taking into account the deep freeze, the deep location of the detector underground and the deeply echeloned shielding of devices from all kinds of ambient radiation, scientists hope to distinguish rare hits of dark matter particles among the signals of natural radioactivity and other interference. They cannot be frequent because of the very weak interaction of ordinary and dark matter, which follows from observations.
However, some kind of interaction (in addition to universal gravitation) is possible - otherwise the experimental study of dark matter should not have been started.
If the rumor is confirmed, it will literally be the most important discovery in physics and astronomy for at least a decade. Not only is it a basic, but completely misunderstood component of our world. There is no place for dark matter corpuscles in the almost sacred standard model of elementary particles for physicists, which perfectly describes the results of all experiments for 30 years. So the discovery of dark matter particles means a breakthrough into the area where physicists are trying to get more than one generation, into the unknown, for which the Large Hadron Collider LHC was built for almost 20 years.
And now, as if weak vibrations from the flight of these particles through the Earth were found experiment CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search - English "cryogenic search for dark matter"), which has been conducted for several years in the Sudan mine in Minnesota. What exactly scientists have found is still a mystery. The cards should open in a week - on Friday, December 18, but potentially the opening is so important that Infox.ru considered it necessary to inform readers about it now.
Suspicious silence
Promotional video:
As has happened more than once, the Polish physicist Adam Falkowski from the American Rutgers University raised the buchu. More precisely, the first messages about the upcoming "very important discovery" appeared on the website of a little-known Brazilian blogger close to the CDMS collaboration, however, Falkovsky spilled out into the English-speaking scientific world only after a reprint, with a few additional facts and lengthy additional reasoning.
In his blog, the theorist writes that the authoritative British journal Nature has accepted for publication an article by the CDMS team, which presents the results of these searches. On December 18, they are to be published by the journal and simultaneously appear in the Cornell University Electronic Preprint Archive. Moreover, the collaboration canceled the filming of the end of the experiment, planned by one of the TV channels for the next few days, they were suddenly postponed for almost a month.
Announcement
"I'll tell you about what we saw …"
“I will present new results from a recent analysis of 612 kilogram-days of CDMS germanium detector data in Sudan Mine …
I will talk about what we saw when we opened the box, whether we saw massive weakly interacting particles, and how what all this will mean for future experiments on the direct detection of dark matter particles”.
(Annotation of one of the CDMS reports - 13:00 Moscow time, 2009-18-12, CERN)
According to Falkowski, Nature would not waste it on trifles like narrowing the limits on the parameters of particles or refining the interaction cross section, so it simply has to go about the positive detection of dark matter particles. The cancellation for a week and a half of all seminars and reports of the CDMS collaboration in various institutions adds intrigue. All of them are either postponed to December 18, or appointed for this date - all over the world (see the annotation of one of these reports).
What where When
However, while the rumor remains a rumor and some details of the alleged announcement are confusing. In particular, Friday is not the time for Nature data to be released. The content of the next issue of this magazine usually becomes known late Wednesday or Sunday evening in Moscow.
Leslie Sage, Nature's senior editor for physical sciences, was not even too lazy to write a special letter to Falkovsky, where he pointed out this absurdity in a rather rude form. Moreover, Sage called "completely false" the claim that Nature is close to publishing an article by the CDMS collaboration on dark matter. However, the rumor, confirmed by several sources, has already been launched and continues to live its own life.
Misunderstanding the
Embargo
The editor's rudeness is probably provoked by the assertion that Nature forbids its authors from discussing their results before the official publication in the journal (this practice is called "embargo"). The statement is not entirely true: the magazine harshly suppresses such discussions in the popular press, but has nothing against discussions on professional platforms like the archive. However, the border between these worlds is becoming increasingly blurred.
Friday is the standard publication day for the prestigious professional journal Physical Review Letters. According to Infox.ru, the release of one very important article on dark matter is already quite definitely scheduled for December 18. On this day, the Fermi Space Telescope collaborators will officially announce that at high galactic latitudes there is no excess of gamma radiation, which has long been associated with the decay of dark matter.
However, this result applies only to high latitudes, far from the galactic equator, and the main cluster of dark matter should be closer to the center of the Milky Way. According to one of the Russian scientists, in the same issue of Physical Review Letters there will be another article by the Fermi team - about the "sweetest" one, with data on low latitudes and the galactic center.
It is possible that at the same time we will learn about the final results of the CDMS. It won't be long to wait.