Last chance for WIMPs: physicists launch all-out hunt for dark-matter candidate

Last chance for WIMPs: physicists launch all-out hunt for dark-matter candidate

Last chance for WIMPs

Researchers are pushing to build a final generation of supersensitive detectors — or one ‘ultimate’ detector — that will leave an elusive dark-matter candidate with no place to hide. For decades, physicists have hypothesized that weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are the strongest candidate, but several experiments have failed to turn up any evidence for them. Over the coming months, operations will begin at three existing underground detectors — in the United States, Italy and China — that search for dark-matter particles by looking for interactions in supercooled vats of xenon. If that doesn’t do the job, researchers will look to rival WIMP detectors that use materials such as germanium and argon. Or perhaps an even more powerful xenon detector, which would be so sensitive that they would reach the ‘neutrino floor’ — a natural limit beyond which dark matter would interact so little with xenon nuclei that its detection would be clouded by neutrinos.

Nature | 5 min read