Recommended by us: A Cosmic Quest for Dark Matter

In the following I attached an article appeared two days ago in The Wall Street Journal about the DarkSide-50 experiment located in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, in which I am deeply involved since I am a member of the collaboration. I was there in those days and for this reason I know also some funny behind the scenes :)

By the way, I was lucky enough to see even more snow than that you see at the beginning of the video, thanks to a big snow storm that happened just a day after the realization of the following interview.

I have attached also some pictures of my stay during the DarkSide General meeting.

Enjoy the read!

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A Cosmic Quest for Dark Matter 

Scientists are hunting one of the biggest prizes in physics: tiny particles called wimps that could unlock some of the universe’s oldest secrets

By GAUTAM NAIK
Feb. 13, 2015 1:32 pm E.T.

A mile under Italy's Gran Sasso mountain, scientists are seeking one of the smallest objects in the universe—and one of the most biggest prizes in physics: a wimp.

A wimp—a weakly interacting massive particle—is thought to be the stuff of dark matter, an invisible substance that makes up about a quarter of the universe but has never been seen by humans.

Gravity is the force that holds things together, and the vast majority of it emanates from dark matter. Ever since the big bang, this mystery material has been the universe’s prime architect, giving it shape and structure. Without dark matter, there would be no galaxies, no stars, no planets. Solving its mystery is crucial to understanding what the universe is made of.

Recommended by us: "Sterile-neutrino hunt gathers pace at Gran Sasso"

The Borexino detector at Gran Sasso: the SOX experiment will soon be using it to look for sterile neutrinos. (Courtesy: Borexino collaboration)

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Much-debated results suggesting the existence of a fourth kind of neutrino, described as sterile, are to be put to the test in a new experiment under Italy's Gran Sasso mountain. The physicists who have devised the experiment say that by using an existing solar-neutrino detector they can carry out an inexpensive yet thorough search for the hypothetical sterile neutrino.

Neutrinos are chargeless, almost massless subatomic particles that interact with ordinary matter only via the weak nuclear force. As a result they can pass through vast amounts of material undisturbed. To study them, physicists build huge detectors – the idea being that a large number of target nuclei will result in a few neutrino collisions that can be detected.

If they exist, then sterile neutrinos would be even more difficult to detect because they probably would not interact with ordinary matter at all – only with other neutrinos. They would do so via "oscillation", a well-established phenomenon in which ordinary neutrinos transform and re-transform continually from one of three flavours – electron, muon and tau – to another as they travel. Likewise, ordinary neutrinos would oscillate into sterile neutrinos and back again but probably over much shorter distances than those typical of normal neutrino oscillation.

Continue to read on http://physicsworld.com

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Recommended by us: CERN and Sterile Neutrinos

CERN Set to Study Sterile Neutrinos

by Edwin Cartlidge on 5 February 2013

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A new experimental facility to detect a hypothetical particle that many physicists think probably doesn't exist could be up and running at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, within 3 years, assuming that the lab's member states approve spending roughly $110 million to build it.

The sterile neutrino, if it exists, would be an obscure variety of an already otherworldly subatomic particle. Ordinary neutrinos, which have no charge and almost no mass, come in three varieties: electron, muon, and tau. They are very hard to detect because their interaction with ordinary matter is extremely feeble, but over the years physicists have detected enough of them to observe that as they travel through space they can "oscillate" from one flavour to another.

This oscillation phenomenon, which means that neutrinos cannot be entirely massless, has been confirmed by many different experiments. But one such experiment produced results at odds with the rest. That was the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which in data acquired between 1993 and 1998 showed muon antineutrinos to be oscillating into electron antineutrinos far more readily than expected.

(Continue to read on news.sciencemag.org)

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