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Employees at the American CDMS Collaboration Announce their detectors managed to fix traces of the existence of WIMPs – particles, of which dark matter basically consists. The statistical reliability of this experiment is very high – it is 99.81 percent. However, other physicists doubt that it was WIMP that was caught – it turned out to be too easy particle found. The world scientific community did not have time celebrate the discovery of evidence of the existence of fermions Marjorams, which physicists suggest are candidates for the role of dark matter particles, as a message appeared about reliable the discovery of WIMPs – other particles of this mysterious substance. CDMS collaborators (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search – something there is a “cryogenic search for dark matter”), whose detectors are located in the mine “Sudan” in the state of Minnesota (USA), said what is the probability of finding them WIMPs in the last series experiment is three sigma (in ordinary language this means 99.81 percent). Although the existence of WIMPs was predicted quite a long time ago, however, scientists still have practically nothing know what these particles are. Experiments previously conducted by the same CDMS staff showed that they have mass, and, moreover, not small – from 30 to 100 GeV (for Comparison – the mass of the electron is approximately 0, 51 MeV). Besides It is known about WIMPs that these particles are from all four types interactions participate only in the weak and gravitational. That is why they are so hard to detect with even the most modern appliances. In short, these particles are completely justify the name given to them by scientists – because the word “WIMP” is short for “Weakly Interacting Massive Particle”, which means “weakly interacting massive particle.” But what about case can I register them? This is easiest to do indirectly. by way. One of them is as follows – it is known that most WIMPs flying through the sun without interacting with it substance. However, if a given particle is scattered on one of nuclei inside the sun, it can reduce speed and stay in gravitational field of our star. So gradually accumulating in this gravitational potential well, wimps concentrate, as a result of which their process begins annihilation. As a result, neutrinos with high enough energy. They leave without any obstacles the center of the sun and heading in all directions, including to our planet, Well, on Earth, these neutrinos can be detected with using special detectors. However, some physicists are confident in that wimps can be detected as a result of direct experiment, This is what employees have been doing for several years the aforementioned CDMS collaboration. The laboratory itself presents a camera located deep in the shaft, in which there is several racks of silicon and germanium disks. They contain at a temperature of only 0.04 degrees above absolute zero. it necessary in order to protect these devices from the so-called external background (for example, neutrino hits from space rays or radioactive particles). On the surface of each of these drives there are two detectors, one of which registers very weak sound vibrations. It is assumed that they arise then, when dark matter particles collide with nuclei of silicon atoms or Germany. The second detector measures the charge of particles that knocked out of the nucleus during such interactions. Based on this data scientists calculate such a parameter as the nuclear cross section of the reaction (a value characterizing the probability of interaction of a particle with core), Knowing it, you can determine which particle collided currently with an atomic nucleus of germanium or silicon. And so a few days ago when the CDMS collaborators checked values of the lower range of data obtained from silicon detectors, they found traces of three collisions of WIMPs with nuclei ordinary atoms. The expected number of such events if if they were noise, equal to 0.7 sigma. However, after calculations it was found that the value of this probabilistic the indicator is still three. And although in order to be sure to state the long-awaited discovery of WIMPs requires a value in five sigma (as it was, for example, in the story with the Higgs boson), but and three sigma is already a major achievement. We can say that WIMP was practically caught by the CDMS-II silicon detector. However, colleagues of collaborators are not in a hurry to share them enthusiasm. The fact is that the mass of the “caught” by the CDMS-II detector the particle is 8.6 GeV, that is, for WIMP it is too easy. The latest evidence is given as a counterargument magnetic alpha spectrometer mounted on the ISS which discovered WIMPs with masses in the region of 250 GeV. This picture suited all from a theoretical point of view, because according to calculations, this the particle should be hundreds of times heavier than the proton (its mass is approximately 938.2 MeV), however, statistical significance the results of the experiment on the ISS were insufficient, therefore, in In this case, it is difficult to say what exactly the detector found there. However, CDMS employees cite data on another experiment (CoGeNT collaboration) as a result of which WIMPs with mass in the region of 7–11 GeV, O were “caught” by the detector the existence of such “light” WIMPs also indicate some interpretations of gamma radiation received by space Fermi gamma telescope from the center of our galaxy. All this, by the opinion of scientists from CDMS, suggests that the existence of WIMP with mass of less than 30 GeV (theoretical lower limit for this particles) it is quite possible, and if this is true, then the detector CDMS-II discovered exactly the mysterious components of dark matter, and nothing else … Anton Evseev
Germany ISS Sun
