By Devin Powell
In the war of the WIMPs, a new combatant has joined the fray. The CRESST-II experiment has seen hints of the weakly interacting massive particles, a leading candidate for the hidden dark matter thought to account for most of the universe’s matter.
The new results, reported September 6 at the International Conference on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics in Munich, add controversy to an already contentious field that is divided into two camps: those that have seen signs of the particles and those that haven’t.
“It’s another small victory for those arguing that this is dark matter, but it’s not going to decisively determine anything,” says theorist Dan Hooper of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. “We still haven’t seen a smoking gun.”
Housed in Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory beneath the Apennine mountains, the CRESST-II dark matter detector is made of supercooled calcium tungstate crystals. When struck by incoming particles, nuclei inside the atoms of the crystals recoil. By measuring the light and heat given off by these collisions, scientists hope to distinguish potential WIMPs from other more common particles.