XENON
esiegel | October 30, 2013“I followed him at the time and thought he was hysterical. He was the first serial killer, a new kettle of fish, because we didn't have the detection techniques in those days.” -Matthew Bright
You can't get mad at a team for trying the improbable, hoping that nature cooperates. Some of the most famous discoveries of all time have come about thanks to nothing more than mere serendipity, and so if we can test something at low-cost with an insanely high reward, we tend to go for it. Believe it or not, that's the mindset that's driving the direct searches for dark matter.
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jhalper | May 29, 2012Not many Israelis make it all the way to the South Pole. (In fact, very few people go there, at all. Not only is it really, really cold, it is extremely difficult and expensive to transport people, gear and necessities to this remote and inhospitable corner of the earth.) So when we learned that Dr. Hagar Landsman, who recently joined the Weizmann Institute’s Physics Faculty, has a part-time gig at the IceCube neutrino detector array, we simply had to write about her. Landsman’s specialty is particle detectors, and IceCube has 5,000 of them buried under several kilometers of ice. In her brief…
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…