US experiment to vote on dark matter

A US experiment is poised to resolve confusion over whether dark matter has already been detected. LUX (the Large Underground Xenon Experiment) at Sanford Underground Laboratory in Lead, South Dakota, announced today that it will release its first results on October 30.  Read more

Dark-matter search from the space station continues to tease

Samuel Ting at his press conference

Ting says he has used some 8 million particle events to map the excess across an energy spectrum from 0.5 gigaelectronvolts to 350 gigaelectronvolts, and that he plans to report it in a paper to be sent to a high energy physics journal in a couple of weeks. He does not yet have sufficient data to report the entire energy range that AMS is sensitive to, up to 1 tera-electron volt, in a statistically meaningful way. Ting had reporters hanging on his every word as he appeared at one point to hint that spectrum might drop off at some energy in a way that could be consistent with a theory of dark matter. But then he added in response to direct questions that he might also have no signal.  Read more