A Dark Matter Detector Based on a Wind Chime Seems Just Weird Enough to Work

[Judi Lynn]

Nathaniel Scharping
Today 12:55PM
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Dark matter physicists may have one of the most frustrating jobs in science. Their work deals with something that must, by almost all models of the universe, exist. But we’ve never found any direct evidence for dark matter. Where other scientists can capture their subjects in a lab and perform experiments on it, scholars of dark matter are left with nothing but a tantalizing set of clues. It’s like studying ghosts—if ghosts were real and also made up a quarter of the matter in the known universe.

Scientists studying dark matter might also be forgiven for feeling a little more anxious lately. A number of expensive experiments meant to find some of the leading candidates for dark matter have turned up empty-handed.

“Now it’s sort of open season,” said Daniel Carney, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Fermilab. “Physicists are really scrambling to think of new ways to look for dark matter and new types of dark matter that could be around.”

Carney thinks he might have a potential solution. The one thing we do know about dark matter is that it exerts a gravitational pull. So why don’t we look for it that way?

As simple as it sounds, it’s an approach that’s never before been attempted, in large part because designing such an experiment involves calibrations so exquisite they seem almost improbable. But Carney and a small group of scientists have begun work on a prototype they say could one day lead to a detector capable of pinpointing the minute gravitational pull of a particle we can neither see nor feel.

More:
https://gizmodo.com/a-dark-matter-detector-based-on-a-wind-chime-seems-just-1845631934

[SWBTATTReg]

1. Aren't the LIGO detectors like this, where a far out gravitational pull exerts a pull over

billions of light years away, indicating that a combination of black holes/neutron stars/etc. have collapsed/merged? The LIGO detectors are huge, and set up to monitor changes in gravity the width of a proton or something this small in size (I'm not sure it's a proton, they're measuring the offset of a light beam to see if distorted).