Scientists’ Search For Invisible Dark Matter Ends Without Results

It seems scientists' effort to find all about the existence of the dark matter has failed as their research ended up without any results. Even after three years of intensive research, the invisible dark matter, which forms more than four-fifths of the universe's matter, still remains a mystery.

Back in 2014, a team of physicists started working with the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) detector to search for dark matter nearly a mile beneath a former gold mine in Lead, South Dakota. The experiment was aimed at searching for weakly-interacting massive particles or WIMPs, which is one of the key theories behind dark matter particles. For the project, the scientist used a large vat of liquid xenon that they hoped would light up when WIMPS bounced off the super-cooled liquid, reported Phys.org.

The research team on Thursday announced at the Identification of Dark Matter Conference (IDM2016) held in England that their dark matter search mission has failed despite use of specialized detector that over reached technological goals in a project that cost $10 million to implement.

Daniel McKinsey, a physicist at University of California and co-spokesman for the dark matter search project, LUX, said that the team is proud of the fact that their project worked so well, but, at the same time they are also disappointed that the project ended without any result after running for more than 20 months.

Brown University's Richard Gaitskell, another scientific spokesman for LUX, said, "LUX has delivered the world's best search sensitivity since its first run in 2013," reported Daily Mail.

He added that while the team failed in their project, they were able to push the dark matter detector's sensitivity to levels four times better than the original project goals.

Despite the failure of the project, the scientists have not lost their hope and have already begun revamping the South Dakota mine site for an higher tech version of the LUX, called LZ, that will be 70 times more sensitive. Operations for the same is expected to start in 2020.

The LUX project at the South Dakota site is one of three places in search of dark matter. The second one is on the International Space Station, while the third project is running at the Large Hadron Collider, run by the European consortium, which is aimed at creating dark matter.