The CDMS result

Merry Christmas, everyone. I know I promised more on Fourier analysis, and I'll get to it, but I want to take a slight detour to mention some exciting results announced last week by the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS), a dark matter experiment based on a different technology than my own. For the last decade, CDMS has been the leading experiment in the field, and their new result is no different. A week ago, CDMS released the results of their most recent analysis, and lo and behold! they had some events. This is exciting.

Before going forward, I'll just mention the methodology at work here. With some notable exceptions (like DAMA, for example), most dark matter experiments work by pushing down the backgrounds as much as possible to reveal the dark matter signal that may or may not be there. Therefore, the majority of work goes into understanding exactly how much background might be left over, with the goal to have "zero" background during the time the experiment is looking for WIMPs. It is generally impossible to have "zero" background - what is possible is a very small fractional expectation of a background. For example, CDMS expected 0.6 background events in their data set. What that means is they studied all possible sources of background using calibration sources and simulations and estimated that in the amount of time they looked for dark matter, on average they would see 0.6 background events.

When they looked at their data, they found 2 events. One can calculate the probability of having 2 background events given an expectation of 0.6, and CDMS has done this; they determined that there was about a 25% chance that the two events could be a fluctuation on the background, leaving a 75% chance that the 2 events were something new, like a dark matter interaction. This is not enough significance to claim a discovery (most physics experiments require a measurement with over a 99.999% chance of being something new before a discovery can be claimed), but it is exciting. Up until now, most experiments have never claimed to see something over background, so these results are a sign that there might actually be something to the last five years of my life. Of course, it's always possible CDMS underestimated their backgrounds.

As mentioned in the NYTimes article, we'll now wait with bated breath for the results from XENON100 in Italy, which should be the next experiment to get results. If the 2 events in the CDMS data are real dark matter events, XENON100 should be able to find out. And then my experiment should follow that up with our own search in a year or two. It's a good time to be involved in dark matter - who knows, maybe we'll figure out one of the biggest mysteries in physics from the last 70 years before the next presidential election.