{"id":275303,"date":"2026-06-18T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/18\/the-search-for-dark-matter-has-blown-wide-open\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T05:40:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T09:40:18","slug":"the-search-for-dark-matter-has-blown-wide-open","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/18\/the-search-for-dark-matter-has-blown-wide-open\/","title":{"rendered":"The search for dark matter has blown wide open"},"content":{"rendered":"

The search for dark matter has blown wide open<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2026\/06\/18\/1138755\/search-for-dark-matter-blown-wide-open\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-06-18 05:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.technologyreview.com<\/a><\/p>\n

The hope is that someday, a bit of dark matter called a weakly interacting massive particle (a WIMP, for short) will collide with a xenon atom, creating a burst of light and electric charge. After running for years, these experiments have recently begun seeing infrequent blips from a particle that glides ethereally through ordinary matter until it crashes into the detectors. Unfortunately, the new signal is not produced by dark matter. Instead, the detectors are picking up on something similarly insubstantial but much more mundane: neutrinos, the featherweight subatomic particles that the sun and other stars produce in massive quantities.<\/p>\n

Physicists\u2019 failure to find dark matter where they thought it was has led to a cornucopia of proposals for new ways to search: quantum sensors, liquid-helium-based detectors, searches in Jupiter\u2019s atmosphere, and more.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Physicists have known for decades that this neutrino background was there; they were just hoping to discover WIMP dark matter first. Now the chance is looking slim. Some of today\u2019s WIMP detectors are simply so large and sensitive that they are entering the so-called \u201cneutrino fog,\u201d in which the ordinary particles are likely to drown out any signal from the main target. There is no shielding these detectors from neutrinos, which easily slip through the Earth itself. That means the next experiment to use this long-standing approach for seeking WIMP dark matter may be the last.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hitting the neutrino fog does not, however, mean an end to the search for dark matter. Researchers just have to shift the focus of their hunt. \u201cWe haven\u2019t seen WIMP dark matter,\u201d says Kathryn Zurek, a theoretical particle physicist at the California Institute of Technology. Nor, she says, have scientists found new particles in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the powerful proton-smashing facility that straddles the border between France and Switzerland. \u201cAnd so people naturally broaden their scope,\u201d Zurek says. As…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The search for dark matter has blown wide open https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2026\/06\/18\/1138755\/search-for-dark-matter-blown-wide-open\/ Publish Date: 2026-06-18 05:00:00 Source…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":275304,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/wp.technologyreview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/GettyImages-1278321226_h.png?resize=1200,600","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275303"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275303"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275305,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275303\/revisions\/275305"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}