WIMP-seeking detector flooded A South Dakota-based dark matter experiment has taken a large step towards go-live, with a detector lowered into its water tank ahead of observations beginning next year. The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) detector was delivered in July. The underground location is designed to shield the detector from cosmic radiation, while …
IIRC: NYDRC (No, You Don't Recall Correctly) - the standardisation was solely for the El Reg's Special Projects Bureau. The only agreement made for the Reg as a whole was the inclusion of some proper Vulture units (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/vulture_central_standards/), but there was no unit included for temperature.
Maybe the Vulture Board should comtemplate including a unit for 'hotness' - so which one ranks higher, the Paris or the Lohan?
The set-up is very reminiscent of the detectors for neutrinos, another particle that very rarely collides with matter. I wonder how they plan to tell dark matter hits apart from neutrino hits? The linked-to site did not explain (apart from mentioning that "techniques themselves can be further scaled up and applied to other fundamental experiments such as double beta decay and solar neutrinos. "
do we stop looking and decide that dark matter is an illusion? Despite numerous similar detectors, nothing has yet shown up, and early results from the LHC show no sign of SuSy or other unexpected particles. It seems fair to give it another few years and then start a serious search for modified Newtonian/Einsteinian dynamics, in order to account for the anomalous behaviour of matter at large scales.
What about this device being built precludes experiments regarding MOND? WIMPs are only one type of dark matter - if dark matter doesn't interact with regular matter AT ALL, then experiments like this would be unable to detect it, and we'd be left with looking for it via its gravitational signature.
The galactic rotation issue that MOND also attempts to explain is only part of the evidence for dark matter, so even if MOND were proven true there would be other observations (galaxies rushing towards a point where apparently nothing exists, etc.) that currently have dark matter as potential candidate and which MOND cannot be the explanation for.
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