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Dark matter experiments are becoming so sensitive, even the ghostliest of particles will soon get in the way.

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Dark matter experiments are becoming so sensitive, even the ghostliest 
of particles will soon get in the way.
> http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/september-2015/hitting-the-neutrino-floor



> 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.
>



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Dark matter experiments are becoming so sensitive, even the ghostliest of particles will soon get in the way. Sam Wormley <swormley1@gmail.com> - 2015-09-18 18:32 -0500

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