Buzz, buzz buzz…. The Interwebs are buzzing still about rumors that the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or CDMS, experiment is on the verge of announcing the very first detection of dark matter particles. That would be big news, indeed, but the general consensus among the physicists of my acquaintance (one of whom is my spouse) is that those rumors are greatly exaggerated. Both Physics Buzz and Ethan at Starts With a Big have excellent posts up explaining just why this is the case, so no real need to rehash those arguments here.
Suffice to say that the strongest fuel for the rumors was a pending publication in Nature; this isn’t true, and the journal’s physical sciences editor minced no words when setting the record straight, even comparing poor Adam Falkowski’s original blog post at Resonaances — the post that launched a thousand rumors — with Fox News. Ouch.
CDMS has released an official rumor-quashing statement, basically saying they’ve completed their analysis and plan to submit a paper to arXiv.org — an awesome site, but not exactly peer-reviewed. I guess we’ll get a preliminary report this Thursday, when CDMS scientists give concurrent talks at Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
In the meantime, maybe you’re curious to know a bit more about this mysterious experiment called CDMS. It operates in an abandoned mine, which means the scientists can’t get to work without boarding a rickety metal cage to lower them some 2300 feet (2341 feet to be precise). Per Physics Buzz: “The dress code is bunny suits, hairnets and slippers, and the cement walls of the ‘office’ are spattered with the dehydrated remains of dead bats.” Good times!
Basically, the scientists monitor germanium crystal detectors hoping to spot an elusive dark matter particle among the rest of the background “noise,” like cosmic rays and neutrinos (the latter are pretty elusive in their own right). It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect to inspire music, but then, you’re not musician Karl Ramberg, whose brother Erik works at CDMS:
Inspired by his brother Erik’s research, musician Karl Ramberg built a musical model of the CDMS detector, in collaboration with CDMS scientists. Erik Ramberg and Priscilla Cushman translated real CDMS data into a format that accurately converts the energy, location and type of particles striking the CDMS detectors into sound and light. Cushman created this 5-minute video.
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