Moscow. October 7th. INTERFAX.RU – Scientists of the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP, Novosibirsk) and Novosibirsk State University (NSU), participating in the international collaboration on the search for dark matter DarkSide, discovered a new phenomenon in the registration of ionizing radiation, the press service of the INP reports.
The data were obtained using equipment manufactured at the BINP specifically for this experiment. In the course of research, a group of Novosibirsk scientists encountered a new phenomenon in the physics of radiation detection.
“We are talking about the appearance of unusual slow components in the signal of the detector. Their unusualness is that it is not known where they come from, and that they increase with an increase in the electric field,” the message says.
Currently, scientists are at the stage of constructing a theoretical model. Their main goal is to find out the nature of the unusual slow components and describe it. To build a theoretical model, it is necessary to carry out several more experiments. Physicists are planning to present a complete description of the data obtained at the detector within a year.
It is noted that in the DarkSide experiments at low energies, strange, yet inexplicable effects are also observed, both in argon and xenon detectors, and depend on the electric field, and, possibly, indicate the registration of some particles.
The DarkSide-50 facility is located in the Gran Sasso underground laboratory of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN). Research institutes from Brazil, Spain, Italy, China, Poland, USA, France and Russia are working on the experiment.
According to modern concepts, approximately 25% of the total mass of the Universe is occupied by dark matter – a form of matter that is inaccessible to direct observation and manifests itself only in gravitational interaction. Ordinary matter, consisting of baryons (protons and neutrons), only takes up about 5%. Everything else is dark energy, some theoretical constant that describes the continuous expansion of the Universe. The existence of dark matter is one of the main mysteries of modern physics. Physicists have so far limited themselves to indirect evidence of the gravitational interaction of dark and ordinary matter and are improving detectors.
