With the detection of a long-predicted “neutrino fog,” the search for particles of dark matter has entered a new age of both possibility and peril
The decades-long search for dark matter could ultimately end in an impasse.
The neutrino fog arises from a fateful cosmic coincidence. The thermonuclear fusion reactions that allow our sun to shine also churn out fast-moving and featherweight neutrinos that can strike xenon nuclei with the exact same momentum that has been predicted for much slower and heavier hypothetical particles of dark matter.
For Morå, seeing the experimental result brought relief—and then excitement. The findings confirmed that the XENONnT detector succeeded at the difficult task of blocking out almost all other unwanted signals—a boon for a field that is historically starved of wins. “It means we didn’t see any weird gremlins,” he says.
In theory, current detectors could begin identifying subtle distinctions between neutrino signals and dark matter signals if they collected thousands of additional data points. Yet doing so would require resources both teams lack. Over two years, the XENONnT detector sensed around 40 neutrinos, and PandaX-4T sensed around 75. To “power through the fog,” O’Hare says, the researchers would need to build a detector that was 100 times larger or run an experiment that was 100 times longer.
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