physicist Davide D’Angelo and geomicrobiologist Jennifer Macalady travel to Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso to see one of the latest efforts to detect dark matter, the SABRE detector. As with the search for neutrinos, looking for dark matter needs to happen under conditions of “cosmic silence” — in this case, beneath a mountain in Italy. D’Angelo, who is a collaborator on the project, likens the search to “hunting ghosts”.

2020-11-24:

the search spans 10e-21 eV to 10e67 eV, 88 orders of magnitude. perhaps the broadest search ever? The lightest that dark matter could possibly be is about one-thousandth of a trillionth of a trillionth of the electron’s mass — which would result in a particle that’s like an extremely low-energy wave, with a wavelength the size of a small galaxy. Lighter (and therefore longer) entities would be too diffuse to explain why galaxies stick together. The heaviest is a black hole of 30 solar masses.

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