"Hunting WIMPs" draws 100 in Pierre
Two physicists leading a hunt for one of nature's most mysterious substances -- dark matter -- will discuss their experiment Tuesday evening during a free public lecture in Pierre.EDITOR'S NOTE: The following story was a press release announcing a Deep Science for Everyone lecture in Pierre, S.D. on Jan. 26. More than 100 people attended, and South Dakota Public Broadcasting also made the talk available as a live webcast. Now the webcast is archived at the SDPB website. For more information contact Communications Officer Bill Harlan at bharlan@sanfordlab.org.
"Hunting WIMPs in the Black Hills" is at 7 p.m. at the Ramkota (Amphitheater 2) at 920 W. Sioux Ave.
For those unable to attend, South Dakota Public Broadcasting will provide a live web cast of the lecture. Web viewers can even ask questions during the lecture via Twitter or e-mail. (Instructions are on the SDBP link.)
Dr. Rick Gaitskell of Brown University and Dr. Tom Shutt of Case Western Reserve University are installing a dark-matter detector 4,850 feet deep underground in the Sanford Underground Laboratory at Homestake in Lead. "We need the unique opportunity this facility gives us," Dr. Gaitskell said. "This tremendous depth -- all those 4,850 feet." The Sanford Lab's depth will shield the sensitive dark-matter experiment from background cosmic radiation.
So far, no one has detected a "weakly interacting massive particle," or WIMP, which is a leading candidate for dark matter. "It's truly one of the great challenges of the early 21st Century," Dr. Gaitskell says.
Last month, in fact, dark matter made headlines around the world when researchers announced they had discovered a possible hint of the substance in an experiment deep in a former iron mine in northern Minnesota, but those results were inconclusive. Dr. Gaitskell and Dr. Shutt previously worked on that Minnesota experiment. Now they've assembled a team of scientists and engineers from nine universities and two national laboratories to build a different kind experiment.* It's called the Large Underground Xenon detector, or LUX, and it will be the most sensitive dark-matter detector of its kind ever built.
Dr. Shutt said that if WIMPs exist, we should be able to detect them on earth -- if the detector is sensitive enough. "Some 30 percent of the universe is in the form of a dark matter fundamentally different from ordinary matter," Dr. Shutt says. "Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs, created in the big bang, are one of the most promising ideas for what this dark matter could be."
Next Tuesday's lecture -- "Hunting WIMPs in the Black Hills" -- will be for general audiences, and especially for students. The Sanford Lab's "Deep Science for Everyone" lecture series already has introduced more than 3,000 South Dakotans to some of the world's top scientists, and Dr. Gaitskell already is doing outreach on his own. During a recent day of skiing at Terry Peak, near Lead, he found himself giving a chairlift talk about dark matter to some young students. "These were snowboarders," Dr. Gaitskell said. "Fourteen-year-olds. And when they said 'Cool!' I really think they meant it. You could see something switching on inside them."
The LUX dark-matter detector will be the first major physics experiment at the Sanford Lab. The South Dakota Science and Technology Authority is re-opening Homestake to a depth of 4,850 feet, but the former gold mine has shafts and tunnels as deep as 8,000 feet underground. The National Science Foundation is considering an even bigger proposal to make Sanford Lab at Homestake a national lab -- the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, or DUSEL (pronounced "DOO-suhl."). A Homestake DUSEL would be the largest, deepest underground laboratory in the world, with experiments in physics, geology and biology.
LUX collaborating institutions:Brown UniversityCase Western Reserve UniversityHarvard UniversityLawrence Livermore National LaboratoryUniversity of MarylandTexas A&MUniversity of California at DavisUniversity of RochesterUniversity of South DakotaYale UniversityWhere and When:Tuesday, Jan. 26, 7 P.M.
Ramkota Amphitheater 2
920 W. Sioux Ave.
Pierre S.D.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, STUDENTS ENCOURAGED TO ATTEND
http://luxdarkmatter.org/collaboration.html
Download a flier for your school, classroom or business.Live webcast: http://www.sdpb.org/livewebcasts