Fermilab

Hugh Lippincott

Hunting for light dark matter in a bubble chamber

June 21, 2013 | Hugh Lippincott

The COUPP Collaboration uses bubble chambers to look for dark matter. This photo shows a seven-bubble event induced by a neutron calibration source in the COUPP-60 detector, now running underground at SNOLAB in Ontario, Canada. Photo: COUPP The headline story in the April 15 issue of Fermilab Today featured the observation by the CDMS experiment of three candidate events that could have been produced by dark matter. That result, combined with several other possible signals, points to a dark matter…

Hunting for dark matter

September 12, 2011 | Hugh Lippincott

COUPP made significant progress in the search for spin-dependent interactions of dark matter, where the dark matter couples to the spin of the target nucleus. The x-axis represents the mass of a dark matter particle, while the y-axis measures the likelihood of having an interaction. COUPP is currently the most sensitive direct detection experiment for spin-dependent dark matter. This shows the COUPP-4 detector’s sensitivity to spin-independent dark matter, where the dark matter couples to the entire nucleus regardless of its…