Controversial dark-matter claim faces ultimate test
Castelvecchi, Davide Castelvecchi, You Can Also Search For This Author In
Within three years, the experiments will be able to either confirm the existence of dark matter — or rule the claim out once and for all, say the physicists who work on them. All will use sodium iodide crystals to detect dark matter, which no full-scale experiment apart from DAMA’s has done previously. “But how to interpret that signal — whether it’s from dark matter or something else — is not clear.” No other full-scale experiment has used sodium iodide in its detector, although the Korea Invisible Mass Search (KIMS), in South Korea, used caesium iodide. The KIMS and DM-Ice teams have built a sodium iodide detector together at Yangyang Underground Laboratory, 160 kilometres east of Seoul. Together, KIMS/DM-Ice and ANAIS will have about 200 kilograms of sodium iodide, and they will pool their data.