buscando la materia oscura

Dark Matter Discovered? Don't Bet on It

Como veréis si leéis la reseña, hay científicos que se dedican a buscar la materia oscura. Este artículo, que se publicará en breve, describe los trabajos que se llevan a cabo en una mina en Minesota (USA) donde creen haber detectado una señal que podría provenir de estas pequeñas e "hipotéticas" partículas sólo detectables por su efecto gravitatorio. De confirmarse el hallazgo, podríamos estar hablando de un futuro premio Nobel (de ahí la referencia a Estocolmo), sin embargo, podría tratarse del "ruido de fondo" generado por los neutrones sobre el detector. Tendremos que esperar.

Rumors are swirling around the blogosphere that a team of physicists may have finally detected particles of dark matter, the mysterious stuff whose gravity appears to hold galaxies together. If those rumors are true, the discovery would surely be one of the most important of all time. But don't book tickets to Stockholm just yet. Given the same team's previously published negative results and the relatively modest increase in the size of their data set since then, experts say, it's all but certain that the new find is of marginal statistical significance.

The rumors center around the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS), a small array of particle detectors lurking in the Soudan mine in Minnesota. The detectors consist of wafers of the semiconductors germanium and silicon and are designed to detect so-called weakly interacting massive particles or WIMPs, which are hypothetical particles thought to make up dark matter. According to posts on physics-related blogs, the CDMS collaboration will report on 18 December that it has detected such particles bumping into the nuclei in the wafers to create distinctive electrical and heat signals. To detect a signal, the physicists must also weed out extraneous "background" events from ordinary particles such as neutrons that occasionally hit the detector.

Still, researchers say that searching for dark matter in this way makes perfect sense--Gaitskell himself is working on such an experiment--and many hope such efforts will pay off within years. Whatever it might be, the rumored CDMS signal could be a hint of more decisive observations to come. But in all likelihood, it won't by itself be enough convince physicists that dark matter has been spotted.