Scientists at an ambitious dark matter experiment in operation at an underground gold mine in South Dakota have discovered exactly what they thought they would: nothing. And the results have got them really excited.
After running the detector for three months and looking for tiny flashes of light that could indicate a dark matter particle collision, researchers with the Large Underground Xenon experiment at the Homestake mine have found no signals beyond the expected background noise. But they did so at far better sensitivities than any such experiment before them, the researchers said.
It’s “the best dark matter detector result out there right now.… Everyone will be talking about it,” LUX scientist Richard Gaitskell of Brown University said in a presentation at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, where the detector is located.
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