One mile beneath a mountain in Italy, scientists at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory fill a particle detector with liquid xenon, hoping to observe evidence of dark matter. The idea is that, free from cosmic rays that interfere with these sorts of experiments aboveground, the lab will eventually detect invisible particles that do not interact with light by mapping how those particles collide with the xenon in the experiment — almost like a group of pool balls that shoots out in all directions when struck by a cue.
Around one billion of a certain group of particles called weakly interacting massive particles — or WIMPS, for short — are expected to pass through this detector per second. But so far, none of them have collided with dark matter, said Dr. Abigail Kopec, an Assistant Professor of Physics & Astronomy at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, who works with the particle detector’s data. However, there are many experiments currently being run in the dark matter hunt, each specifically geared to detect it based on what we know about how it behaves in the universe.
