Article content continued

“There’s a large amount of mass that goes unaccounted for. We know that there’s matter out there, but we haven’t directly seen it,” he said.

The $3.35 million in funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation will be used to develop and build detectors that use liquified noble gases to identify extremely rare subatomic processes.

Boulay has been leading the DEAP-3600 experiment in SNOLAB, an underground laboratory in a mine two kilometres under the surface of the earth near Sudbury. One hypothesis suggests that dark matter consists of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, known as WIMPs. The rock overburden at SNOLAB filters out cosmic rays that would interfere with WIMP detection. The DEAP-3600 experiments searches for dark matter particle interactions using a detector containing 3,600 kilograms of liquid argon.

Dark matter research is one of the highest-profile areas of particle physics — and it’s highly competitive. The detectors being developed for the Carleton lab will support the study of neutrinos and dark matter at SNOLAB. The lab will be used by researchers at Carleton and others in its network, which includes TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, as well as the University of British Columbia, McGill University and Université de Sherbrooke.

“In my field we’ve been looking to demonstrate conclusively the existence of this particle. We’ve been looking for two or three decades. We haven’t found it yet. We don’t know what the mass of the particle is, or how likely it is to interact with other matter,” said Boulay. “We understand that we have a lot of work ahead of us.”

He estimates it will take a year to construct the first set of prototype detectors for the lab at Carleton. The lab will occupy about 2,000 square feet of space in the Herzberg building.

“We want to be able to define future programs — what detectors we will be able to build in the next 20 years,” said Boulay. “We’re at the leading edge of what’s possible, and we want to push that.”