Hunting For Dark Matter: Physicist Establish An Underground Facility In An Abandoned Gold Mine

Merely twenty percent of the mass of this universe is made up of material that scientist are able to identify. Remaining eighty percent is still unknown, which is so called the "Dark Particle" or "Dark Matter". To discover this particle scientist arranged a more improved experiment in abandon gold mine in South Dakota.

Revealing the truth behind the existence of the concept of Dark matter, researchers are working on an experiment where they built a detector that may be detecting the Dark matter. The experiment is called LUX-ZEPLIN, or LZ for short held in one mile underneath of an abandoned gold mine in the town of Lead, South Dakota.

This experiment is expanded research on previous 'Large Underground Xenon' experiment or LUX. Scientist prior to this underground facility because it is shielded from radioactive radiation and gas making it as the ideal place for sensitive Dark matter experiment.

This whole project is led by ten scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where they designing and testing the detector. In an interview, researchers explained the idea where they set their detector as a bell that will ring when influenced by a dark matter particle. There are two outer chambers designed to detect and remove the contaminated particle within a chamber filled with 10 tons of liquid xenon.

When a Dark particle collides with a xenon atom causing a chain reaction and produces a burst of ultraviolet light and releases free electrons. After a moment, these free electrons excite the xenon gas at the top of the chamber then produce another brighter burst of light that can be detected by 500 ultra-sensitive photo-detectors called, photomultiplier tubes. This photomultiplier distinguishes the true dark matter collision from other contaminated particle collisions.

Based on a report from Yahoo, Carlsmith and Sridhara Dasu, professors from the University of W-Madison are designing computational systems to manage and analyze the data received from the detector. Kimberly Palladino, an assistant professor at the same university and Shaun Alsum working on a simulation that increases the sensitivity of the detector of new LZ system. They claimed that this improvement can strictly discard signals produced by ordinary matter and made the experiment more effective than previous one.

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