For a change, U.S. particle physicists are savoring some good news about government funding. The Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced on Friday that they will try to fund two major experiments to detect particles of the mysterious dark matter whose gravity binds the galaxies instead of just one. The decision allays fears that the funding agencies could afford only one experiment to continue the search for so-called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. It also averts having to choose between the two leading WIMP-search teams in the United States.link.
"We have the opportunity right now for the U.S. experiments to push further in sensitivity and possibly make a discovery," says Richard Gaitskell, a physicist at Brown University and a member of the team developing a WIMP detector called LZ, one of the two leading projects. "There's a real commitment from the community and the funding agencies." Blas Cabrera, a physicist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and spokesman for the rival SuperCDMS experiment, says that having to pick only one team “would have been a grave mistake."
For decades, astronomers and astrophysicists have reasoned that some sort of otherwise unobservable dark matter provides most of the gravity that keeps the galaxies from flying apart. Physicists hope to identify that stuff by detecting particles of it floating around us. For example, dark matter could consist of WIMPs, hypothetical particles that would barely interact with ordinary matter and weigh much more than protons.
