Physicists working at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in central Italy, located 1400 m under the mountain of the same name, are soon to start taking data from two new experiments. Each facility will target a different kind of missing matter: one will search for dark matter while the other will try and detect absent neutrinos to prove that neutrinos are their own antiparticle.

Dark flash

The hunt for dark matter – the mysterious substance believed to make up about 80% of all matter in the universe but not yet detected directly – will be carried out using XENON1T. This experiment, which was inaugurated at an event at Gran Sasso today, consists of 3.5 tonnes of liquid xenon. It is designed to measure very faint flashes of light that are given off whenever particles from the dark matter halo of the Milky Way collide with the xenon nuclei. The xenon will be stored at a temperature of about –100 °C in a cryostat and surrounded by a tank containing some 700 tonnes of purified water to minimize background radioactivity.

Run by an international collaboration of 120 students and scientists from 22 institutions, XENON1T is expected to be about 100 times more sensitive than its 160 kg predecessor experiment and around 40 times better than the world’s current leading dark-matter detector – the 370 kg Large Underground Xenon experiment in South Dakota, US. Due to start taking data by the end of March next year, XENON1T will either detect dark matter or place severe constraints on the properties of theoretically-favoured weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), says collaboration spokesperson Elena Aprile of Columbia University in New York.

Dark heart

The other new experiment at Gran Sasso is the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE), which will look for an extremely rare nuclear process known as “neutrinoless double beta decay“. That decay, if it exists, would involve two neutrons in certain nuclei decaying simultaneously into two protons while emitting two electrons but no antineutrinos (unlike normal beta decay), implying that the neutrino is its own antiparticle. Due to turn on early next year, CUORE will measure the energy spectrum of electrons emitted by 741 kg of tellurium dioxide surrounded by radioactively inert lead blocks recovered from a Roman ship that sank 2000 years ago.

Meanwhile, towards the end of 2016 another group of scientists at Gran Sasso should take delivery of about a kilogram of cerium oxide powder, which they will place several metres below the Borexino neutrino detector. The Short Distance Neutrino Oscillations with BoreXino (SOX) experiment will look for a sinusoidal-like variation in the number of interactions generated within the detector by neutrinos from the radioactive cerium. SOX leader Marco Pallavicini of the University of Genoa says that such a variation would be a sure sign of “sterile” neutrinos – hypothetical particles outside the Standard Model of particle physics that would “oscillate” into ordinary neutrinos but would not interact with any other kind of matter.

In the video below, Luke Davies of the University of Bristol explains why physicists believe that the universe is full of dark matter