Wednesday, September 07, 2011

Cresst Detected 67 Possible Dark Matter Events

Oh, here we go again.

The Cresst experiment in Italy has reported 67 possible dark matter events, possibly from WIMP interactions.

Cresst is just one laboratory dedicated to catching the flighty particles in deep underground detectors.

It uses 33 lumps of a crystal called calcium tungstate. When a Wimp smashes into an atomic nucleus within the crystals, the experiment is designed to see evidence both of a phonon and a photon - the sound and the light of the interaction.

The Cresst team says that in their experiments between 2009 and 2011, they have seen 67 such events that cannot be explained by other means.

The data are at a level of certainty of more than "four sigma" - strong suggestions, but still shy of what can formally be called a discovery.

We'll have to give this quite a bit of time for it to be properly digested and verified.

Zz.

2 comments:

Douglas Natelson said...

CDMS to disagree strongly in 5, 4, 3, 2....

Douglas Natelson said...

I was being facetious with my comment last night, but having looked at the preprint now, it's clear that the cresst claims are in strong conflict with both CDMS and Xenon-100 exclusion regions. So, someone is likely wrong somewhere in dealing with backgrounds and systematics.