Potential hints of bizarre new particles in a darkish matter detector have evaporated with new knowledge.
Following up on a beguiling outcome from its predecessor experiment, the XENONnT experiment discovered no signal of additional blips that would level to new particles or one other phenomenon, scientists report July 22 in Vienna on the International Conference on Identification of Dark Matter.
The XENONnT experiment (pronounced “xenon n ton”), on the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, makes use of 5.9 metric tons of liquid xenon to seek for darkish matter, an elusive substance that thus far has been seen solely by way of its gravitational results within the cosmos (SN: 10/25/16). The detector is designed to search for darkish matter particles crashing into xenon atoms’ nuclei, inflicting them to recoil. But the detector also can spot recoiling electrons.
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In 2020, a smaller model of the experiment, referred to as XENON1T, reported greater-than-expected numbers of these ricocheting electrons (SN: 6/17/20). “This caused a lot of stir when we published it,” says physicist Rafael Lang of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
That surplus, some scientists urged, may have been defined by some sudden new physics, corresponding to hypothetical light-weight particles that will originate from the solar referred to as photo voltaic axions. But the surplus wasn’t massive sufficient to be convincing, so extra knowledge have been wanted.
In the brand new evaluation, which makes use of about 97 days of information, XENONnT noticed as many electron recoils as anticipated resulting from identified particle interactions, the researchers additionally reported in a paper posted on the experiment’s web site. Scientists don’t know what precipitated the additional detections within the earlier experiment, but it surely’s potential it was merely a statistical fluke, Lang says. Or it could have been resulting from small quantities of tritium — hydrogen atoms with two neutrons of their nuclei — within the detector.
With the purple herring out of the best way, XENONnT researchers are actually combing by way of their knowledge for nuclear recoils, in hopes of detecting the actual deal.