About a week ago, Jodi mentioned that an issue of “Stanford Scientific”, a student-driven science magazine, had hit the market. A few days ago, when I was at the Stanford physics department (while Jodi was at some kind of post-doc survey), I grabbed a copy. You can get the online version here: http://www.stanfordscientific.org.
My first interest was the dark matter article, which focused on work done by physicists at the Kavli Institute (at SLAC) and collaborators elsewhere. I was disappointed however, that when they mentioned future efforts in the search for dark matter they talked about colliders, but not direct detection methods (like CDMS, at Stanford). There are three pillars in the foundation of dark matter science: astrophysics, direct detection, and colliders. All three play a critical role in our understanding of this mysterious 25% of the universe.
Colliders might let you create dark matter in the lab, but you can’t “see” its effects directly on the detector. What you would see would be something invisible, and heavy, recoiling off of known matter particles. Direct detection, by contrast, looks for the scattering of dark matter right off of nuclei in a detector medium (germanium, or silicon, or a liquid noble element). You see the effect of a dark matter particle directly on the medium, as opposed to adding up everything you know to try to infer what you cannot see. If a collider sees something heavy and invisible, it could be a graviton, or a mini black hole, or a long-lived Higgs boson from some strange suppersymmetry scenario. By contrast, direct detection experiments are dealing with invisible particles at low energies, spread throughout the modern universe. To be dark matter, you cannot just be heavy and invisible – you also have to exist in the universe today.
I expressed my opinions about this missing research pillar to the editors of the magazine, and I must say: they are a friendly bunch! Overall, this is an impressive magazine, and I look forward to seeing them share more of Stanford’s science.
