Dark Matter Worth Searching For Null Results

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What if everything we know about dark

matter is totally wrong?
It’s the biggest puzzle in science: we see only five per cent of all
matter. This is the epic tale of the unending hunt for dark matter
By KATIA MOSKVITCH
5 days ago
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T
here’s a mine, deep underground in Canada,
that’s unlike any other. Just outside of Sudbury,
Ontario, in a forest where curious bears frequently
forage for raspberries in backyards, Creighton
Mine workers in blue hard hats extract nickel from deep
BOOK TICKETS
below the ground. But when they enter the half-open, jittery
pitch-black lift to descend into the spacious cavern, they
share the ride with a bunch of other hard-hatted folks. Their
hats are orange though, and they are mining for something
completely different: nothing.
That is, nothing so far. The fellow miners are actually
physicists working at a massive, subterranean lab dubbed
SNOLAB. It’s located at a depth of two kilometres – so deep
you could easily stack four and a half Empire State buildings
into this hole, one on top of the other. SNOLAB detectors
scour the cosmos for the elusive stuff thought to make up the
bulk of matter in our universe: dark matter. It’s an almighty,
and thus far unfruitful, search.
So far, we have been able to detect only a measly five per
cent of all matter in the universe; this atomic matter makes
up all the galaxies and stars, planets, black holes, quasars,
pulsars, neutrinos – as well as humans and all other life on
Earth. The rest is unknown stuff, dark matter (25 per cent)
and even the more enigmatic dark energy (70 per cent). We
can observe dark matter’s gravitational effects on stars and
galaxies but can’t seem to net its “dark” particles with any of
our instruments. And boy have we tried.
Why are we trying to catch it? Sure, we won't be able to
make the next generation cosmic smartphones out of dark
matter. Nor will we be able to turn it into gold. But observing
it will help us understand how galaxies actually hold
together without flying apart – which they should do with
the amount of atomic matter we are able to detect. After all,
our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is thought to live in a vast
cloud of dark matter – the so-called dark matter halo.
Finding dark matter will also help explain why we observe
objects in deep space said to be optical illusions – when
of dark matter that acts like a giant gravitational lens,
bending the light from the galaxy and thus distorting and
magnifying the image. This is called gravitational lensing.
Or, to put it Meet
moreussimply,
at WIRED Smarter this
scientists areOctober
searching for dark
matter because they want to scratch an almighty itch. “It’s
BOOK TICKETS
that itch you get when you’re laying awake at night and you
get hit with this sudden thought of, ‘What does this all even
mean?’” says Daniel Coderre, an experimental physicist at
the University of Freiburg in Germany.
To get to SNOLAB, researchers take a lift down 2000m and then walk
another 1.4kms through the Vale Creighton mine
Credit Getty Images / Randy Risling
A
s Joe Walding, a physicist at Royal Holloway,
University of London who often works at SNOLAB,
enters the two-storey lift, he smiles broadly. The
journey down takes about six minutes, and it’s not
for the faint-hearted: the lift doesn’t have any lights, and the
darkness is almost palpable; its top is half-open, and it
shakes and bangs so much on the way down that people
sometimes faint. “You certainly shouldn’t stick your arm out
days: in May, the scientists at SNOLAB got exciting news. The
lab, operating since 2011, has just received funding approval
from the US Department of Energy to build a brand-new dark
matter experiment, scheduled to start operating in 2020.
Mightier than any other (and there are many), the uber-
sensitive SuperCDMS will BOOKcost
TICKETS
some $34 million – and will be
tasked with finally spotting what no other detector has
spotted yet; no pressure.
Despite huge pots of money being poured since the 1970s

into dark matter experiments on, under or above Earth,
despite endless late nights spent doing calculations, and
despite plenty of media coverage, researchers keep getting
nowhere. Apart from SNOLAB, there is the LUX experiment
in Lead, South Dakota, one mile underground in an
abandoned gold mine. It has obtained zero results. In France,
the EDELWEISS experiment in a lab under the French Alps,
under 1.7 km of rock, has found nothing. The PandaX
experiment in the Jin-Ping sub-terrain laboratory in China
hasn't spotted any particles either. In India, Jaduguda
Underground Science Laboratory opened last year, 550
meters below the surface at an operating uranium mine. So
far, they have found nothing (well, they've only been looking
for a year). And on, and on, and on.
The leading theory is that dark matter is made out of
particles that interact with normal, atomic, matter or light
only through gravity - by exerting a gravitational pull.
SuperCDMS will be looking for a very specific type of such
exotic particles, so-called WIMPs, or weakly interacting
massive particles. That’s the main (some say most obvious)
dark matter candidate several detectors are searching for.
Scientists are even trying to create these particles in the
largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world,
the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva (which cost
nearly $7 billion to build). But all in vain.
So just how much longer can researchers justify that they
are looking for something unknown and finding nothing, but
still get away with asking for more money to look for
important as finding something.
“The only difference is that if you find dark matter, you get a
Nobel Prize, but the importance in setting the limits [where
Meet us
there is no dark at WIRED
matter] Smarter
is just the this October
same,” says physicist
Walter Fulgione from Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare
BOOK TICKETS
(INFN) in Italy. That’s because setting tighter and tighter
limits rules out hypotheses that seem viable, narrowing the
window of search. After all, it took a century to detect
gravitational waves, predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916, and
nearly half a century to spot the Higgs boson in the LHC.
Researchers knew what they were looking for and null
results year after year helped them to better constrain their
search limits. “The game is one about steady progress over
years and decades, slowly chipping away at the possible
range of models,” says Dan Hooper, an astrophysicist at the
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) just outside
Chicago.
Avi Loeb, a Harvard astronomer, describes science as “an
island of knowledge surrounded by an ocean of ignorance”. If
you search for a lion in the desert, you can find it eventually
by excluding successively bigger regions of the desert in
which you do not find the lion until you narrow the region to
the footprint of the lion itself, he says. But this is true only if
you know that a lion lives in the desert. Well, the good news
is that the majority of researchers do agree that, like a lion in
the desert, dark matter should be out there... somewhere.

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The Bullet Cluster, consisting of two colliding clusters of galaxies,

shows evidence for dark matter
Credit Nasa
A
s the lift reaches the bottom of the Creighton
Mine, it first bounces up and down a few times
before coming to a halt. To get to SNOLAB,
researchers then have to navigate nearly two
kilometres of dark, narrow tunnels, carefully dodging the
nickel miners and their equipment. And it’s not just the
miners that they have to be mindful of. The area around the
mine – above ground, that is – is home to bears who
sometimes wander in to say hello. Once, a researcher went
out for a smoke, recalls Walding. Suddenly, he was face to
face with three juvenile black bears that were stalking the
scientists’ house next to the mine. A bear’s head appeared
right next to his knee. “He had to have a big gin and tonic
when he came back inside,” laughs Walding.
While the nickel mine has been around since the 1920s, the
physics lab was only founded in 1992. The seemingly unusual
location – deep underground – is not because of lack of space

that rain down on us every second of every day. “We’re
particularly worried about muons, which can interact with
the matter surrounding our detectors and create neutrons,
which can mimic a dark matter signal,” says Coderre. Thick
slabs of rock can stop them in their tracks, though, helping
scientists eliminate thisBOOK TICKETS
interfering background noise.
While dark matter searches at SNOLAB (and elsewhere) have
so far yielded nothing, the Creighton Mine did help one
physicist, Art McDonald, get a Noble Prize in physics in 2015.
That was for his work on neutrinos – ghostly, nearly
massless particles that originate in the core of stars, in
faraway cataclysmic events like supernovae, but can also be
produced on Earth. Just like dark matter, they were theory
once, first proposed in 1930; it took 26 years before the first
neutrino was detected.
To accommodate SuperCDMS, the lab will be upgraded, to
account for more electrical power, lighting and cooling. The
apparatus will consist of a solid-state germanium and silicon
detectors, cooled to extremely low temperatures of within a
fraction of a degree above absolute zero. The capsule
housing the detectors will be plunged into a water tank, with
water also acting as shielding – to reduce the amount of
background noise from the radioactivity of the mine. Many
pieces of the experiment will be assembled and tested at
surface facilities – famous physics laboratories like
Fermilab, SLAC and PNNL – but the final assembly will be
done underground at SNOLAB.
And what if SuperCDMS finds nothing? There are a couple of
other experiments here at the mine such as DEAP-3600 that
use a slightly different technology – namely, a nobel gas
called argon to try and detect the WIMPs. That’s where
Walding works, and those detectors will continue searching
for WIMPs alongside the new experiment.
But for Coderre, null results provide important feedback
about the theory – and help adjust it. “Finding nothing is
obviously disappointing, but when searching for something
completely new you sort of have to accept that as a likely
And that means attacking the problem on many fronts.
Several experiments in former and current mines, under
mountains and in space are searching for WIMPs – and it’s
the steady progress over decades that counts, slowly
chipping away at the possible range of dark matter models.
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“SuperCDMS will very likely make solid progress on this
front,” says Hooper, adding that the detector will focus
specifically on a new mass region for the WIMPs, which
would assume that they are much lighter than what other
detectors have been looking for. And just because other
experiments have failed does not make the odds of SNOLAB’s
future resident succeeding any smaller, he adds, narrowing
the range of possible dark matter candidates.
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ith SuperCDMS still in the planning stage,
spare a thought for the scientists who have
been hunting for dark matter for many decades
deep under the Italian Apennine Mountains,
about an hour’s drive from Rome. Their dark matter detector
is in a lab near the city of Aquila, which got ravaged by the
2009 earthquake (luckily, the lab wasn’t affected, but many
physicists based in Aquila were). To get to the lab, the road
takes you through a ten kilometre-long tunnel for about
seven minutes, until you arrive deep below Gran Sasso, the
highest peak. Turn off at a special exit, press a button,
identify yourself in Italian over a speaker to the guard, and
two huge metal double doors open to reveal a spacious
Founded in 1984, for the first two decades the researchers
here were mainly studying neutrinos and cosmic rays. The
dark matter hype caught on with the science crowd in
mid-2000, and in 2002 the first detector – XENON10 – was
switched on. It’s been getting upgrades ever since, morphing
into XENON100, and now BOOK TICKETS
XENON1T, trying to catch the still
hypothetical, but extremely rare interactions of WIMPs with
ordinary matter.
The underground space is humongous. XENON1T is housed
in one of three cavernous halls, each about 20 metres wide,
18 metres high and 100 metres long, all sporting their own
experiments – 18 in total. They are designed for all kinds of
science, from detecting solar neutrinos to study the inside of
our Sun, to the biggest detector in the world that one day
may catch the theoretical Majorana particle. About 950
researchers from 32 countries work in the lab.
In the dark matter hall, the most massive structure is a giant
tank about 10m in diameter and 11m tall, resembling a large
grain silo. It neighbours a three-storey glass building
crammed with cryogenic pipes, pumps, coolers, subsystems
and electronics, whose sole aim is to service the detector.
The detector itself is inside the tank, sealed in a metre-thick
stainless-steel cryostat. The detector and everything around
is made of low-radioactivity materials, to reduce background
‘noise’ – just like at SNOLAB, radioactive materials emit
electrons, gamma rays or neutrons that the detector is able
to spot, messing up the picture of a potential arrival of a rare
dark matter particle. To suppress any further unwanted
background interactions, say from cosmic rays, the cryostat
is immersed into about 700 tonnes of water in the outer
tank. Some 1,400m of rock on top helps, too.
Inside the cryostat, the instrument is surrounded by two
tonnes of ultra-cold liquified xenon gas (whereas the name of
the experiment, slightly confusingly, is XENON1T – that’s
because in the actual central core of the detector, the most
sensitive part, there’s only one tonne of the liquified gas).
Xenon is not just colourless and odourless, it’s also one of

contaminants on the surface of molten iron.
When xenon atoms get excited by particles – and despite all
the precautions, there are still electrons, gamma rays and an
Meet us at WIRED
occasional atmospheric Smarter
muon thatthis
makeOctober
it into the detector
– they emit tiny flashes of light, a property shared by several
BOOK TICKETS
other rare gases. And liquified xenon has a great stopping
power – it’s very sensitive to passing particles.
The light flashes are registered by photo devices and later
analysed. So far, all the signals have been discarded. “We are
searching for a signal nobody has seen before and this only
works if our background is both well-understood and as low
as possible,” says Coderre, who’s the former analysis
coordinator of XENON1T.
XENON1T has been running since 2016, and its latest batch of
data, published in May, reveals the familiar null results.
However, say scientists, the limits they managed to put on
the effective size of dark matter particles are the most
stringent ever – one-trillionth of one-trillionth of a
centimetre squared, or 4.1x10-47 square cm. Effective size,
or in science talk ‘cross-section,’ is how strongly WIMPs are
thought to be interacting with normal matter – the atoms of
xenon. To determine it, researchers sifted through 279 days
of data, during which time they were expecting to register
up to ten dark matter events. None happened – which means
that WIMPs must be even smaller than previously believed.
There are always two people on shift – ‘shifters’ – either in
the underground lab or in the research facility near the
mountains, which sports a multitude of offices, a canteen and
even a bar. The shifters operate the detector remotely using
tablets, constantly keeping an eye on any interesting data
readings, to make sure a dark matter particle isn’t missed. In
total, about 160 scientists work on the experiment from 26
scientific institutions in the US, EU and Asia.
To keep the detector extremely clean and minimise
contamination by radioactive impurities that can be carried
by dust on or in the detector materials, researchers need full

January, XENON1T will be switched off. Researchers will take
the detector out, only to replace it over the following months
with a much larger one, called XENONnT. The upgrade will
cost in the tens of millions of euros, split between the
collaboration members. What helps is that the outer tank
will stay the same. TheBOOK TICKETS
inner chamber, though, will be filled
with six tonnes of liquid xenon instead of two. The
instrument should start processing data by the end of 2019.
If that detector still finds nothing, researchers here at Gran
Sasso are likely to try just one more time with an even larger
instrument before moving to different technologies. “The
hunt for traditional heavy WIMPs will reach a natural
conclusion with the next stage of the LHC and the big XENON
dark matter experiments,” says Daniel Bauer from FNAL. “It
is still possible these will be found in the next few years but,
if they are not, then the standard WIMP hypothesis looks like
the wrong answer.”
While the WIMP detectors keep on searching, more and more
researchers are developing other theories about the nature
of dark matter and working on experiments to catch it. It’s
multi-faceted interrogation of the dark matter puzzle. In the
frame are much lighter hypothetical dark matter particles,
axions, and neutral particles called sterile neutrinos.

breaking into pieces
Credit Akihiro Ikeshita/JAXA
Meet usaxions
at WIRED Smarter this October
I
t’s not that are a particularly new idea. First
thought of in 1977, these
BOOK particles are supposed to be
TICKETS
much lighter than WIMPs but have been in and out of
fashion for decades. But now, in light of continuous
nothingness from all the various WIMPs catchers, many
scientists are considering axions their second-best bet.
The theory goes that the axion would interact with photons –
very weakly, but interact nonetheless. This is how the Axion
Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX), housed at the Centre for
Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics at the
University of Washington, is trying to catch them. Unlike
SNOLAB and XENON1T, ADMX is in a typical physics lab, and
consists of a detector in a tank about four metres high. It
consists of a very large superconducting magnet and a
microwave cavity, and works similarly to a radio receiver,
says Gray Rybka, a physicist at the University of Washington.
It’s like if the researchers had a radio that’s searching for a
radio station, but they have no idea about its frequency – so
they are turning the knob, slowly, trying to hear a signal
when the frequency is just right.
The magnet generates a strong magnetic field, and receivers
should register the specific electromagnetic radiation
produced if an axion were to pass through the field,
converting its energy into a weak microwave signal that
researchers can detect with quantum electronics. Because
the signal the experiment is looking for is expected to be
much lower in energy than those produced by cosmic rays or
radioactivity, ADMX doesn't have to be shielded by rock or
water. It does have to be shielded from mobile phones, Wi-Fi,
and television signals. “It literally is a radio receiver. The
only difference is that we convert axions into radio waves in
the first step of the experiment,” says Rybka.
ADMX isn’t new – it was built more than two decades ago, in
1995. In 2010, it was moved to the University of Washington
caused by axions.
The temperature of the ADMX is -273C, only 0.15C above
absolute zero – colder than deep space. “There's a great deal
Meet
of work in the us at WIRED Smarter
refrigeration this October
operation and moving liquid
helium around,” says Rybka. It's liquid helium that keeps the
BOOK TICKETS
detector so cold, and it's important because the temperature
has to be cold enough for the superconducting magnet and
quantum electronics to work. Also, the colder the
experiment is, the lower the noise, and the clearer a detected
signal will be.
Most times the lab is quiet and empty, because the data
acquisition is largely automated. Researchers control and
monitor it via the internet day and night, though. About once
a year, operation stops, scientists warm the system up to
room temperature and pull the internal detector out of the
magnet. “This is the most spectacular time to see the lab:
everyone is wearing their helmets and cryo-safety gloves as
we carefully move the system into a clean room, where we
install the new upgrades over the course of a few months,”
says Rybka.
He is convinced that so far, the searches for dark matter
“have been looking for the wrong thing”. With ADMX, he
says, the equipment is sensitive enough to find just the right
signals, and all that is left is to slowly look over the plausible
masses. “We've finally got the volume knob turned up
enough, and now we just need to turn the frequency knob
until we hear the signal,” he says. “Our chances are good.
Certainly better than ever before.”
At the moment, ADMX is looking at frequencies
corresponding to the 4G-LTE mobile phone band, but
researchers are also developing technologies to explore the
Wi-Fi band at higher frequencies and lower frequencies like
AM radio. In April, ADMX delivered its latest results – null
results, that is. For Rybka, they are important though,
because it shows that the detector actually has the correct
sensitivity to find the axion. “If we end up with a null result
after having swept over all the plausible masses, it would
then we're faced with the problem that either we don't
understand our nuclear physics, or we don't understand how
the early universe works well enough. So a null result would
cause our questions to multiply.”
Plenty of scientists are busy developing alternative
BOOK TICKETS
approaches to netting dark matter, and many are even
looking at alternative theories of gravity that would be able
to explain the way our universe works without any need for
the exotic dark stuff. However, the recent direct observation
of gravitational waves coming from a collision of two
neutron stars helped bury a number of such theories, so the
idea that dark matter is out there somewhere is still very
much alive.
XENON1T detector is inside a massive water tank under 1400m of rock in

Gran Sasso, Italy
Credit XENON Collaboration
I
f we don’t find axions or WIMPs, there’s another back-
up: sterile neutrinos. These are theoretical particles
The idea is that sterile neutrinos of the right mass might
decay producing an X-ray spectral feature – so would be
detectable with an X-ray spectrometer. Just like with other
experiments, until very recently such instruments did not
have sufficient sensitivity and spectral resolution to
accurately measure theBOOK TICKETS feature. Then the Japanese
predicted
space agency, JAXA, together with Nasa, sent its Hitomi
satellite into orbit on February 17, 2016, carrying what they
hoped would be just the right type of spectrometer. Except it
didn’t stay there long – having made some initial
observations of the Perseus cluster, Hitomi suddenly died
three weeks later, breaking up into five pieces.
That was a big blow – it cost $273 million to build the
doomed satellite. But scientists don’t get fazed easily, and
both the Americans and the Japanese have already cobbled
together a replacement, a satellite called XRISM (the X-Ray
Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission). On July 1, it was
approved in Japan, and will sport two instruments, Resolve –
a high-resolution X-ray spectrometer, and Xtend – an
imaging instrument. The cost to rebuild the spectrometer
has been quoted at $70 million to $90 million.
The team decided to call the new spectrometer Resolve “to
give it a more meaningful name – it resolves X-ray light into
its component colours, and to give it a name that reflects the
determination of our team to get back to where we were with
Hitomi as quickly as possible,” says Richard Kelley, the
principal investigator for the US part of the instrument on
the Hitomi recovery mission at Nasa. The new spectrometer
will detect photons by how much heat they deposit in the
detector and will operate at just 0.06 degrees above absolute
zero. It will observe clusters of galaxies and individual
galaxies, aiming to detect that very specific spectral feature
that has the right energy and strength to be the predicted
signature of the decay of a sterile neutrino.
It’s based on the assumption that X-rays are absorbed in
small pixels, and convert their energies to heat, which can be
precisely measured with microscopic thermometers. Resolve

energy, and if this energy is in the X-ray band, we can use
Resolve to detect individual neutrinos and make a
histogram, or spectrum, of their energies,” explains Kelley. If
the neutrinos have a very well-defined energy, it will be
possible to see this as a narrow feature in the spectrum.
BOOK TICKETS
XRISM should be launched between April 2020 and March
2021, on a JAXA H-IIA rocket from the Tanagashima Space
Centre, following the path of Hitomi. And what if XRISM
doesn’t find the spectral feature? As usual, detecting nothing
is still something. “Rejecting a sterile neutrino as a possible
dark matter candidate would reduce the candidate ideas
considerably,” says Richard Mushotzky, an astronomer at
University of Maryland.
It seems that with the hunt for dark matter, for the
researchers involved, there are two possible outcomes. To
quote the famous physicist Enrico Fermi: “If the result
confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement.
If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made
a discovery.” In the seemingly unending hunt for dark
matter, the discovery of nothing means a lot.
Want to know more about the future of space exploration?

This article is part of our WIRED on Space series. From the
global fight over how we handle first contact with aliens to
the endless search for dark matter and the inside story of
China's top-secret space ambitions, we're taking an in-
depth look at humanity's future amongst the stars.
The unending hunt for Planet Nine, our solar system's
hidden world
What can sci-fi teach us about Donald Trump's Space Force?
The weird history and terrifying future of mutiny in deep
space
Follow the hashtag #WIREDonSpace on Twitter for all of
our coverage.

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Meet us at WIRED Smarter this October

What if everything we know about dark

Welcome to WIRED UK. This site uses cookies to improve your

Despite huge pots of money being poured since the 1970s

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The Bullet Cluster, consisting of two colliding clusters of galaxies,

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The almighty tussle over whether we

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XENON1T detector is inside a massive water tank under 1400m of rock in

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Want to know more about the future of space exploration?

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Meet us at WIRED Smarter this October

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