LUX opens new avenues in the detection of dark matter - LOCAL.PT

COIMBRA – International experience Large Underground Xenon – LUX – which includes a team of six researchers LIP (Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics) and Department of Physics, University of Coimbra, is the most sensitive experiment in the world for the detection of dark matter, reaching a sensitivity to particles thought to constitute the dark matter (WIMPs) twice better than any other experience ever held.

The first results of the experiment conducted by a collaboration that brings together 17 research groups from Universities and Research Laboratories of the United States, the UK and Portugal, announced recently from Sanford Underground Research Facility, Lead, South Dakota , USA, where the experience is installed since 2012, so the show.

The results of LUX

were awaited with great anticipation as documenting the recent news of the prestigious journal Nature.

dark matter (so called not emit or absorb any type of radiation) is essential to explain the universe, and it is expected to account for over 80% of its mass. However, to date only the gravitational effects of dark matter were observed (for example the study of the velocity of stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies) and its nature remains entirely unknown. Thus constitutes one of the most intriguing problems in physics today.

One hypothesis is more likely to be dark matter consists of particles that physicists called WIMPs (English acronym for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). The name derives from having an extremely reduced likelihood of directly interacting with matter we call normal (non-dark), which makes their detection particularly difficult in technological terms.

For three months, the LUX experiment collected data from observations of signals due to interactions between dark matter and normal matter, using the largest detector ever built for this purpose, located in Sanford underground laboratory in the U.S. state of Dakota South, about 1.5 km depth.

“The detector uses a LUX 350 kg of liquified xenon at -100 ° C and is installed as 1.5 km depth, the vast majority of cosmic rays are absorbed by the rock, and hence the probability to reach the detector is 10 million times lower than at the surface, thus not disturbing the observation of the signs of the interaction of WIMPs with xenon detector, “explained the researchers LIP-Coimbra who have a key role in the project LUX, both at engineering (accounting for the detector and associated subsystems having been involved in all stages of installation in underground laboratory) as the analysis and processing of data.

LUX will soon start a new period of searching for dark matter with this detector with an expected duration of one year. «Getting improve sensitivity now announced about ten times and detect WIMPs’ are the expectations of researchers. Also already underway preparations for the construction of a new detector to succeed LUX, using the same technology and installed in the same laboratory, but with a mass of xenon 7 tons and a sensitivity about 200 times better.