No, things aren’t looking good at the moment for WIMPs, those previously virtual particles that were once considered a promising candidate for dark matter. It’s true that a research team has been using the DAMA experiment at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory to prove it for years. However, the international research community has always been skeptical – and that skepticism is likely right. because one A study published in the journal Science Advances It is suggested that whatever the experience of DAMA shows, it is possible that WIMPs are not.
On the one hand, this is a shame, because it means that researchers still have no idea what dark matter is. It is said to make up the majority of matter in the universe, and has greatly influenced the formation of structures in the universe and protecting our galaxies from just flying away to this day. Tragically, dark matter can only be observed through gravity – otherwise it cannot be observed at all or interacts little with the remaining visible matter.
On the other hand, the findings of the Govinda Adhikari working group of the University of California San Diego are a good example of how science actually works. Although the DAMA Collaboration has been claiming for years to have definitely found signs of WIMPs, it has been reluctant to share its raw data with the professional world. Other dark matter detectors also looking for WIMPs found none of these signs. However, some of these detectors work with other materials and want to detect interactions between WIMPs and atoms of the noble gas xenon. On the other hand, Dama uses special sodium iodide crystals.
COSINE tests DAMA .’s dark matter
In order to truly verify the DAMA results independently, a detector that works with the same crystals must be found. And one of those is in South Korea and it’s called COSINE. It is specifically designed to either confirm – or refute – the results of DAMA. In 2018, the co-researchers came to an end: COSINE cannot reproduce the DAMA signal after approximately 60 days of observation.
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