Dark Matter Rumour
In between a morning session – technically a “half-away-day” discussing Strategic Issues in the Development of Postgraduate Research at Cardiff University (zzzz..) and tootling off to Bristol this afternoon to give a recapitulation of my public lecture on the Cosmic Web to the South-West Branch of the Institute of Physics in Bristol, I don’t have time to post much today.
I will, however, take the opportunity to do what the blogosphere does best, which is to spread unfounded (or perhaps partly founded rumours). If it’s true this one is a biggy, but I’m not responsible for any loss or damage arising if it turns out to be untrue…
The rumour (which I first heard about here and then, a bit later, there) is that the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment (which is based down a mine in Minnesota, but run from the University of California at Berkeley) is about to announce the direct discovery of dark matter.
I don’t have any inside information, but it is alleged that the collaboration has had paper accepted in Nature – and they generally only publish really significant results rather than upper limits (unless they are to do with gravitational waves). Nature articles are embargoed until publication, meaning that the collaboration can’t release the results or talk about them until December 18…
..so I guess you will just have to wait!
December 8, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Well, it seems it was really just a “rumour”; Nature’s respond to the speculation has been published in the Resonaances blog ( http://bit.ly/7TsPW5 – at the bottom of the original post )… Couldn’t understand the editor’s harsh tone tough…
December 8, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Leslie Sage has written to the proprietor of Resonaances stating that Nature has not accepted a paper from CDMS at this time.
December 8, 2009 at 9:16 pm
RESONAANCES published an email reportedly from the Phys Sci editor of Nature which denies an upcoming publication from CDMS, if you read the link posted.
December 8, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Quite so. Maybe it is just an unfounded rumour then. Still, if it generated a little frisson of excitement on a damp Tuesday in December then it can’t have been all bad.
And if anyone accuses me of being irresponsible in spreading this rumour, let me just say that at least I’m not responsible for starting it.
December 9, 2009 at 12:29 am
There probably will be such an announcement on Dec 18, but if not in our Universe then maybe in one of the other 10^500 Universes that we now know are out there!
December 9, 2009 at 12:44 am
Spreading leeks eh?
December 18, 2009 at 4:19 pm
[…] Matter Week. Tags: cdms, cryogenic dark matter search, dark matter, lolcats trackback Last week a rumour spread round the internet that an experiment based down a mine in the USA (the Cryogenic Dark […]
December 19, 2009 at 6:29 pm
[…] temperatures did manage to remind me that I hadn’t closed the book on a previous story about rumours of a laboratory detection of dark matter by the experiment known as CDMS. The main rumour – that there was going to be a paper in […]
December 20, 2009 at 10:19 am
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