Potential hints of weird new particles in a dark matter detector have evaporated with new data.
Following up on a beguiling result from its predecessor experiment, the XENONnT experiment found no sign of extra blips that could point to new particles or another phenomenon, scientists report July 22 in Vienna at the International Conference on Identification of Dark Matter.
The XENONnT experiment (pronounced “xenon n ton”), at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, uses 5.9 metric tons of liquid xenon to search for dark matter, an elusive substance that so far has been seen only via its gravitational effects in the cosmos (SN: 10/25/16). The detector is designed to look for dark matter particles crashing into xenon atoms’ nuclei, causing them to recoil. But the detector can also spot recoiling electrons.