Will The "There Is No God" Crowd ever give up? Search for dark matter comes up empty so far

Will The "There Is No God" Crowd ever give up? Search for dark matter comes up empty so far

By Seth Borenstein and Chet Brokaw

LEAD, S.D. — Nearly a mile underground in an abandoned gold mine, one of the most important quests in physics has come up empty-handed, scientists announced Wednesday.

The most advanced Earth-based search for dark matter – the mysterious material that has mass but cannot be seen – turned up “absolutely no signal” of dark matter, said Richard Gaitskell of Brown University, a scientist working on the Large Underground Xenon experiment. A detector attached to the International Space Station also has failed to find any dark matter.

Physicists released their initial findings Wednesday after the experiment’s first few months of operation at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, which was built in the former Homestake gold mine in South Dakota’s Black Hills.

With 4,580 feet of earth helping screen out background radiation, scientists tried to trap dark matter, which they hoped would be revealed in the form of weakly interacting massive particles, nicknamed WIMPs. The search, using the most sensitive equipment in the world, tried looking for the light fingerprint of a WIMP bouncing off an atomic nucleus of xenon cooled to minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit.

But nothing was found, said co-investigator Daniel McKinsey, a physicist at Yale University. They will look for another year, but McKinsey and Gaitskell already plan to build a more sensitive experiment on the site.