Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Dark Matter Appears to be Wimpier

A new experiment has lowered the constraints of the strength of the interaction between Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) and the rest of matter. This means that these WIMPs, which are candidate to be the mysterious Dark Matter than account for 3/4 of matter in the universe, are even MORE weakly interacting than previously thought.

The XENON collaboration announced their results at the American Physical Society's April meeting in Jacksonville, Florida, on 14 April. Their work pushes the maximum possible strength of WIMP interactions down by a factor of six from the previous record, set by the Cold Dark Matter Search (CDMS-II) experiment at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2005. The new limit is stringent enough to test some particle-physics theories of supersymmetry.


GREAT!

This will only will that make it more difficult to detect. The good thing is that this results eliminates several theories about Dark Matter in one stroke.

Zz.

No comments: