{"id":392631,"date":"2026-04-11T03:03:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T03:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/392631\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T03:03:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T03:03:09","slug":"dark-matter-experiment-reaches-critical-milestone-deep-underground-sciencealert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/392631\/","title":{"rendered":"Dark Matter Experiment Reaches Critical Milestone Deep Underground : ScienceAlert"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scientists at the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering have reached a milestone with the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search<\/a> (SuperCDMS) experiment.<\/p>\n

Located deep underground at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Laboratory<\/a> (SNOLAB) in Canada, the world’s deepest underground laboratory, this experiment is designed to detect the Universe’s unseen mass, aka. dark matter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The SuperCDMS team recently announced that they had successfully cooled the experiment to its operational temperature, hundreds of times colder than outer space.<\/p>\n

Formally hypothesized in the 1970s by famed astronomer Vera Rubin (for whom the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is named), dark matter is the mysterious mass that theoretically accounts for 85% of mass in the known Universe.<\/p>\n

Despite sixty years of ongoing study, scientists have yet to find concrete evidence of this matter or determine what it is composed of.<\/p>\n

\"darkScientists are working on the design of the low background shield, which creates a zone free of the trace radioactivity that could overwhelm the faint dark matter signal. (Greg Stewart\/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory<\/a>)<\/p>\n

However, the most widely accepted theory is that it is composed of large particles that interact with “normal matter” via gravity, known as the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) model.<\/p>\n

The experiment, designed to detect dark matter particles already passing through Earth, consists of a four-meter-tall, four-meter-diameter (~13 x 13 ft) cylindrical enclosure made of layers of ultra-pure lead.<\/p>\n

This shielding protects the detectors inside from radiation, including neutrons and gamma-rays produced by high-energy cosmic rays passing through our atmosphere.<\/p>\n

\"Subscribe<\/a><\/p>\n

Reaching its base temperature marks a major transition for SuperCDMS, which is 1\/1000s of a degree above absolute zero (-273.15 \u00b0C; -459.67 \u00b0F), the temperature at which atomic and molecular motion ceases.<\/p>\n

Said Priscilla Cushman, a professor in the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy and the Spokesperson of SuperCDMS, in a UMN press release<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Getting to base temperature is a major milestone in a years-long campaign to build a low-background facility capable of housing our sensitive cryogenic solid-state detectors.<\/p>\n

At these extremely low temperatures, our installed detectors can now scan a whole new region of parameter space where the lightest dark matter particles may be lurking.<\/p>\n

In addition to designing and assembling the low-background shield that protects the detectors, University of Minnesota researchers also developed the machine learning<\/a> algorithms and analysis techniques.<\/p>\n

These will be used to rapidly extract dark matter signals from data once the experiment becomes operational in a few months.<\/p>\n

Related: Dark Matter May Have Finally Been Detected in Our Galaxy’s Glow<\/a><\/p>\n

With the base temperature achieved, the collaboration will now move into the months-long process of detector commissioning, during which they will turn on, calibrate, and optimize each detector channel.<\/p>\n

In addition to dark matter, SuperCDMS will allow scientists to study rare isotopes, study energy depositions down to the electron-volt level, and possibly discover new types of particle interactions.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published by Universe Today<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists at the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering have reached a milestone with the Super…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[61,60,248,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-392631","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-physics","11":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}