The scientist who first detected the neutrino called the strange new particle “the most tiny quantity of reality ever imagined by a human being.” They are so absurdly small and interact with other matter so weakly that about 100 trillion of them pass unnoticed through your body every second, most of them streaming down on us from the sun.
And yet, new experiments to hunt for dark matter are becoming so sensitive that these ephemeral particles will soon show up as background. It’s a phenomenon some physicists are calling the “neutrino floor,” and we may reach it in as little as five years.
The neutrino floor applies only to direct detection experiments, which search for the scattering of a dark matter particle off of a nucleus. Many of these experiments look for WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. If dark matter is indeed made of WIMPs, it will interact in the detector in nearly the same way as solar neutrinos.
We don’t know what dark matter is made of. Experiments around the world are working toward detecting a wide range of particles.
“What’s amazing is now the experimenters are trying to measure dark matter interactions that are at the same strength or even smaller than the strength of neutrino interactions,” says Thomas Rizzo, a theoretical physicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. “Neutrinos hardly interact at all, and yet we’re trying to measure something even weaker than that in the hunt for dark matter.”
To read more, click here.