Final steps are nearing completion before scientists flip the switches on the dark matter detector situated deep in a former South Dakota gold mine. They are asserting that they can start to collect data as early as this February. Regarded as the worlds most sensitive dark matter detector, this detector was lowered into a 70,000 gallon water tank nearly a mile below the earths surface. This was done in hopes to isolate dark matter from cosmic radiation, as the radiation makes detecting dark matter an impossible task.
Soon, questions of the age-old universe may finally be answered, the scientists asserted. A professor of physics at the University of California states “We might well uncover something fantastic. One thing about our field is that it’s kind of brutal in that we know it’s expensive and we work hard to only do experiments that are really important.”
Much like the discovery of the Higgs-Boson earlier this year in Switzerland, the discovery of dark matter could give the world of physics a good shake, but of course, at a very large budget of roughly $10 million. It’s been known for awhile by scientists (and those who bother looking into this stuff) that dark matters existence is linked to the gravitational pull that it exerts. Unlike normal matter, like a glass of water or a bag of diamonds, we cannot actually see it, or even detect it (so far). About four percent of the universe’s mass is made of “regular matter”, and roughly 25 percent is made of “dark matter”.
After the Homestake Gold Mine in Lead, South Dakota, shut down for good, it was instantly targeted by scientists for their detector. After years of fundraising and planning, the scientists were able to move the LUX detector into the Sanford Underground Research facility. It took a good two days in order to coax the phone booth sized detector down into the once-filthy mining shaft. The water in which the detector is submerged in is run through reverse osmosis filters in order to be deionized and cleaned.
“The construction phase is winding down, and now we’re starting the commissioning phase, meaning we start to operate the systems underground,” said Jeremy Mock, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis who has worked on the LUX experiment for five whole years. According to Mock, submerging the extremely delicate detector underground into a water-filled vat 6 meters tall and 7.6 meters wide took more than two months. At the moment, scientists are working to finish the plumbing that is needed in order to keep the xenon as clean as possible. Xenon is a substance, in both liquid and gas form, that will fill the detector and be continually circulated through a purifier which works much like a dialysis machine. It pulls the xenon out and removes any impurities, then puts it back into the detector. In doing so, the xenon will be kept free of contaminants, such as radiation, that may otherwise cause false alarms in their detection of dark matter.
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