21-05-2012
A PhD student from the Dep. of Physics at the FCT/UNL and scientists from the University of Lisbon working on the SIMPLE (“Superheated Instrument for Massive Particle Experiments”) experiment using a different technique, have announced new results in the quest, published in Physical Review Letters last week. The results join the American experiments in denying the claimed WIMP observations, and also provide the strongest constraints to date against a WIMP interaction with protons which depends on the nuclear spin of the target atoms in the detector materials; for the first time, the results overlap with results from indirect search efforts (which attempt to observe particles produced by WIMP collisions between themselves). Together with XENON, which is sensitive to WIMP-neutron interactions dependent on the nuclear spin, the two reduce the possibility of any spin-dependent WIMP interaction by 50%, further restricting the hunting field in which physicists seek their dark matter quarry.
Link do artigo: http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v108/i20/e201302
Link do SIMPLE: http://sites.google.com/site/dm2011simple/
