Xenon Experiments have detected a bunch of energy events in the 1-7 kilovolt data, which could be an indication of dark matter or contamination of their experiments.
There are three possibilities for the readings:It could be axions which are particles that theoretically make up dark matter;It could be neutrinos which are particles that carry no electric charge and zip through the cosmos;or tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen that would indicate the experiment was contaminated.
One to two months of readings are needed when they restart the machine.
The XENONnT experiment uses a total of 8.3 tonnes of xenon to search for the ever elusive dark matter particles. In addition to the existing 3.3 tonnes of ultra-pure xenon from XENON1T, another 5 tonnes of xenon were purchased by the XENON collaboration.
1/n We saw an excess of events in the energy region 1-7 keV in XENON1T data. There are 285 electronic recoil events observed, with 232+-15 expected from the background. Extensive checks allowed us to exclude backgrounds from known particles and systematic effects as the source pic.twitter.com/L6yYY3tKUI
— Laura Baudis (@lbaudis) June 17, 2020
SOURCES- Purdue University, Xenon Italy, Laura Baudis TwitterWritten By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
