
Breakthrough Announced in Dark Matter Detection Technology - indescions_2018
http://www.washington.edu/news/2018/04/09/admx-detection-technology/
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komali2
Can someone help me understand, is the "breakthrough" this? :

>t is the world’s first and only experiment to have achieved the necessary
sensitivity to “hear” the telltale signs of dark matter axions. This
technological breakthrough is the result of more than 30 years of research and
development, with the latest piece of the puzzle coming in the form of a
quantum-enabled device that allows ADMX to listen for axions more closely than
any experiment ever built.

Basically, is the purpose to announce that a new higher-fidelity device has
come online? If that's the case, I feel mildly bamboozled... creation of a
newer, better tool doesn't to me indicate any new "discoveries" regarding dark
matter.

I'm pretty bad at understanding anything "physics" above the most basic
classical stuff though so it's very possible I'm totally off base here.

~~~
ajross
The headline calls it a "breakthrough technology", not "breakthrough science".

Basically this is a new experiment about to begin operating. If nothing goes
wrong, within a few years we'll be able to confirm or reject the axion theory
of dark matter. Which is pretty big news, all told. A confirmed axion
detection would be at least as important to physics as the Higgs result from
CERN or the discovery of the W/Z in the 80's.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> If nothing goes wrong, within a few years we'll be able to confirm or reject
> the axion theory of dark matter.

Well, we'll be able to reject the _current_ axion theory of dark matter. I
suspect we won't be able to reject all possible ones. (But I don't know for
sure.)

~~~
ajross
That's sorta speciously true of any experiment. The space of hypotheses is
infinte, you can only target one. Ruling out one attractive and well-supported
theory would be news on its own. A confirmation of a particle discovery would
be bigger still, of course.

~~~
Nomentatus
The axion may not be an example of the following, but there are highly
specific predictions of new particles (etc) that drop out of current theory
and knowledge. Antiparticles, from Dirac is one example. If they hadn't been
found there would have been no motivation to look for something much like an
antiparticle, since those variants wouldn't have fit into Dirac's theory.

So not speciously true of all predictions or most (before String Theory came
along!)

------
iooi
Original paper here:
[https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.151...](https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.151301)

~~~
madengr
Thanks. Do you know a non-pay-walled link to :

[https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.3583380](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.3583380)

~~~
underko
SciHub works.

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noetic_techy
I hope they detect nothing. I'm rooting for modified gravity theories.

~~~
davidcuddeback
Modified gravity theories don't fit all the evidence, such as the distribution
of mass in the Bullet Cluster [1] or the large-scale structure of the CMB [2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Cosmic_microwave_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#Cosmic_microwave_background)

~~~
truantbuick
Some would disagree:

[http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/04/no-that-galaxy-
with...](http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/04/no-that-galaxy-without-dark-
matter-has.html)

As a non-scientist, it seems like dark matter has been relentlessly adjusted
and overfitted and still appears very inadequate to fit all the evidence.

~~~
davidcuddeback
> Some would disagree

Some do, but they're in the minority (which, to be clear, doesn't necessarily
make them wrong). You can find scientists who refute climate change, too. That
says nothing of the state of prevailing consensus, though.

~~~
zamalek
> You can find scientists who refute climate change, too.

That's an appeal to nature as well as a false equivalency. It is difficult to
refute climate change because we have incredible amounts of tactile
observations that match predictions - the stuff from which the scientific
method stems.

At one point science (well, philosophy as the progenitor of science) said that
the Earth was flat. It was a small number of rebellious scientists that
corrected this misconception. Group-think and consensus do not mean that you
are correct, it could mean that you are collectively wrong.

We've never seen dark matter. The so-called "evidence" that is continuously
regurgitated[1] is an image of the _problem._ It would be like making a map of
the missing periodic table of elements and calling it all "Dark Elements,"
never bothering to figure out what the missing elements individually are. We
didn't do that, which is why we can do so many useful things with heavier
elements today.

If axion decay is observed, I will have no choice but to agree with the WIMP
theories. As it stands, there is _zero_ credible and scientific evidence for
the stuff.

[1]:
[http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2007/01/3D_map_of_da...](http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2007/01/3D_map_of_dark_matter_as_seen_by_Hubble)

~~~
civilitty
_> We didn't do that, which is why we can do so many useful things with
heavier elements today._

This article is literally about the development of new sensor technologies
designed to make that kind of progress for dark matter.

It seems you just have a chip on your shoulder and a complete misunderstanding
of the concept of dark matter.

~~~
zamalek
_> This article is literally about the development of new sensor technologies
designed to make that kind of progress for dark matter._

Which is exactly what the last paragraph in my comment addresses.

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Taniwha
there was a Scientific American article on this a few o months back (sadly
paywalled).

Essentially they can ringfence the potential masses/energies of axions based
on other things, if they exist, this device contains a resonant cavity that
should be able to detect them breaking down across most of the theoretical
energy range

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angel_j
What frequency range are they scanning?

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wheresmyusern
i recently saw a paper that called into question the expansion of the
universe. i think it was by a man called eric lerner. he provided evidence
that seemed pretty convincing. is there anything to this?

~~~
russdill
Looks like he's one of the electrical universe proponents.

[http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/lerner_errors.html](http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/lerner_errors.html)

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starpilot
No. Some things are not meant to be questioned. Science has gone too far.

~~~
Wh1zz
What makes you say that?

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toddio
I hope other scientists figure out the riddles the dark matter theories are
supposed to solve. These particle hunts seem like a waste of time and money.

