Theorists imagine a different kind of dark matter
Physicists are revisiting what they previously assumed about how dark matter interacts with itself.
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Dark matter’s signature could be written in stone
A proposed dark-matter detection method would look for tracks of dark matter etched into billion-year-old mineral samples.
From the atmosphere to the underground
Read the travelogue of a xenon atom as it journeys from the air we breathe to a dark-matter detector a mile underground.
Dan Hooper: What happened at the Big Bang?
From New Scientist, Jan. 25, 2021: The Big Bang left us the universe — and a major set of mysteries around antimatter, dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic inflation. While the Large Hadron Collider looks at what the laws of physics were like a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, Dan Hooper, head of theoretical astrophysics at Fermilab, thinks the answers to these puzzles may depend on better understanding that first fraction of a second — even closer to the universe’s beginning.
The search for dark matter is dramatically expanding
From Quanta Magazine, Nov. 23, 2020: Physicists plan to leave no stone unturned, checking whether dark matter tickles different types of detectors, nudges starlight, warms planetary cores or even lodges in rocks. Their efforts include the SENSEI and ADMX experiments, in which Fermilab plays a key role.
LZ preps to begin dark matter search
Department of Energy officials have formally signed off on project completion for LUX-ZEPLIN, or LZ: an ultrasensitive experiment that will use 10 metric tons of liquid xenon to hunt for signals of interactions with theorized dark matter particles called WIMPs.
The detector with a billion sensors that may finally snare dark matter
From New Scientist, July 1, 2020: Fermilab theorist Gordan Krnjaic and Fermilab postdoc Daniel Carney of the University of Maryland are quoted in this article on efforts to sense its minuscule gravitational force as it brushes past us.
A day in the life of a dark matter data wrangler
As she grew up in the small town of San Pellegrino in the Italian Alps, three things conspired to make Maria Elena Monzani a physicist: a fascination for outer space, a Nobel Prize and a nuclear disaster. Now she prepares an international team to search for clues to one of the biggest scientific mysteries.
A tiny new experiment at the LHC
One day in 2017, the idea to detect particles that had potentially been escaping the LHC for years unnoticed by the gigantic detectors suddenly became feasible. The story of the latest experiment approved for installation at the Large Hadron Collider starts with a theorist and a question about dark matter.
Dark matter vibes
SuperCDMS physicists are testing a way to amp up dark matter vibrations to help them search for lighter particles.