In its first three months of operation, the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment has proven itself to be the most sensitive dark matter detector in the world, scientists with the experiment announced today.
"LUX is blazing the path to illuminating the nature of dark matter," Rick Gaitskell, professor of physics at Brown University and co-spokesperson for LUX. The detector's location, more than a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, offers a "supremely quiet" environment to detect the rare, weak interactions between dark matter particles and ordinary matter, Gaitskell said.
The first results from the experiment's initial 90-day run were announced today during a seminar at the Sanford Lab in Lead, S.D.
"What we've done in these first three months of operation is look at how well the detector is performing, and we're extremely pleased with what we're seeing," said Gaitskell, one of the founders of the LUX experiment. "This first run demonstrates a sensitivity that is better than any previous experiment looking to detect dark matter particles directly.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-10-results-lux-dark-detector.html#jCp
"LUX is blazing the path to illuminating the nature of dark matter," Rick Gaitskell, professor of physics at Brown University and co-spokesperson for LUX. The detector's location, more than a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, offers a "supremely quiet" environment to detect the rare, weak interactions between dark matter particles and ordinary matter, Gaitskell said.
The first results from the experiment's initial 90-day run were announced today during a seminar at the Sanford Lab in Lead, S.D.
"What we've done in these first three months of operation is look at how well the detector is performing, and we're extremely pleased with what we're seeing," said Gaitskell, one of the founders of the LUX experiment. "This first run demonstrates a sensitivity that is better than any previous experiment looking to detect dark matter particles directly.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-10-results-lux-dark-detector.html#jCp