A report detailing more than three months of scientific observations contains no clues that may indicate dark matter actually exists. The paper shows the conclusions of 100 days of surveys, conducted using the XENON100 experiment in Italy.The facility is operated by the Italian National Institute for Physics (INFN) Gran Sasso National Laboratory, and is located deep underground. At its core, it contains liquid that was supposed to be capable of detecting the passing of weakly-interacting massive particles.
WIMP are widely believed to be the class of particles that make up dark matter, the type of matter present in the Universe that interacts with normal matter through the force of gravity, but which is otherwise undetectable.
Experiments such as the one managed by the XENON Collaboration have been set up precisely to identify such particles, and to demonstrate that dark matter actually exists. But the actual scientific data do not support the existence of either WIMP or dark matter.
The new paper was published online in the Cornell University Library journal arXiv, and it was also submitted for review to the journal Physical Review Letters, for publishing in an upcoming print issue.
According to investigators, the XENON100 experiment was able to identify three candidate events that could have qualified as WIMP detections. Two of them were expected, and were most likely produced by background radiation, whereas a third provided inconclusive readings.
That is not to say that physicists are now convinced WIMP do not exist. They say that the detector is so sensitive, that an actual detection should occur soon. Granted, while dark matter is one of the leading explanations for a wide array of phenomena in cosmology today, there is still a chance it's not real.
It could be that there are other explanations for why the gravitational pull of galaxies is larger than normally possible considering their mass. Right now, experts believe that dark matter and dark energy are the most plausible methods of explaining how the Universe is set up.
With its WIMP target featuring 62 kilograms of liquid xenon, the underground particle detector is tremendously sensitive. It filters out other forms of radiation by using water, lead and copper shielding, among others.
IF the massive particles are discovered, then this would imply that normal matter makes up only about 4 percent of the mass of the Universe, with 73 percent accounted for by dark energy, and the remaining 23 percent made up of dark matter.
The most important supporters of XENON100 include the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy, the Swiss National Foundation, l'Institut national de physique des particules et de physique nucléaire and La Région des Pays de la Loire in France, the Max-Planck-Society and by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Germany, and the Weizmann Institute of Science.
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