dama
drorzel | May 6, 2010There's a minor kerfuffle at the moment over the XENON experiment's early data (arxiv paper) which did not detect any dark matter in 11 days of data acquisition. This conflicts with earlier claims by the DAMA experiment and recent maybe-kinda-sorta detections by the CoGeNT and CDMA experiments.
As a result, a couple of members of other collaborations have posted a response on the arxiv saying, basically, that they don't believe the sensitivity claimed for the XENON detector in the energy range in question, and that their result can't really be said to rule out the possibility of dark matter…
esiegel | April 18, 2008Remember how I told you earlier this week that DAMA was going to announce that they found dark matter, even though the signal that they found is not consistent with other experiments?
Looks like my powers of predicting the future are pretty damned good. They have a new plot with more data showing the continued modulation at a certain energy range:
and also one showing the fact that they see a bunch of extra events happening in that energy range:
So here's the stuff that DAMA has seen: a nuclear recoil that has many events in a certain energy range, and has a 2% annual modulation in that…
esiegel | April 14, 2008The DAMA collaboration, an experimental team searching for dark matter via direct detection, is poised to report this week that they have discovered Dark Matter. And I'm here to pre-empt that by bringing you the truth: no, they haven't.
They take some very cold (cryogenic) atoms,
look for nuclear recoils resulting from dark matter collisions, subtract the background, and draw conclusions based on whatever's left over. Their expectations are based on the following:
Neutrons, neutrinos, and other standard model particles from the Earth, the Sun, and the Milky Way galaxy will collide with the…