For nearly three decades, one dark matter claim has refused to disappear. In 1997, the DAMA/NaI experiment detected a signal that changed with the seasons, a pattern that seemed to match what some physicists expected if Earth were moving through a halo of dark matter.
The follow-up DAMA/LIBRA experiment reported a similar annual pattern, keeping the claim alive. But many physicists remained unconvinced because other direct detection experiments did not see the same signal.
To test the result more directly, researchers built two sister experiments, ANAIS-112 and COSINE-100, using the same basic approach as DAMA/NaI and DAMA/LIBRA. In 2021, the first ANAIS-112 dataset showed no matching seasonal variation, weakening the case that dark matter caused the original DAMA signal.
A new study published in Physical Review Letters combining data from ANAIS-112 and COSINE-100 now rules out the dark matter explanation with greater confidence
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