Starting in 2012 and continuing for 5 years, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) will use its newly constructed camera, DECam , to observe a large swath of the southern sky out to vast distances in order to provide new clues about the nature of dark energy – or why the universe’s expansion is accelerating. The… More »
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CDMS – Things are Cooling Down! The search for Dark Matter is competitive and exciting. Last spring we had a little too much excitement in the Soudan Underground Laboratory with a fire that caused an uncontrolled end to a SuperCDMS R & D run. Fortunately, the damage to the SuperCDMS project was minor and we… More »
Do we live in a hologram? The number of large spacial dimensions is a question that has periodically resurfaced over the years. Theories derived from black hole thermodynamics state that the area of an event horizon is sufficiently large to hold all of the quantum information of the particles that conspired to make the black… More »
Weak lensing tomography is becoming a competitive method of constraining cosmology and dark energy. Tomography, as opposed to cosmic shear, concerns itself with the change in lensing shear with the redshift of the source (background) galaxies. This becomes particularly powerful when used on fields containing massive galaxy clusters whose mass can be constrained in multiple… More »
DM-Ice is a new experimental initiative. By building a 250 kg array of NaI crystals within the volume of the IceCube neutrino detector, DM-Ice will provide a direct check of the DAMA dark matter result. DAMA/LIBRA and its predecessor, DAMA/NaI, are the only experiments that claim to have observed dark matter interacting with ordinary matter. … More »
Recent results from the CDF collaboration have found a 3.2 sigma deviation from the predictions of the Standard Model in the lepton + missing energy + di-jet channel. With Joachim Kopp and Ethan Neil of Fermilab’s Theoretical Physics group, Matthew Buckley and Dan Hooper of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group have proposed that this anomaly is… More »
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) will probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. A 570M-pix camera, the DECam, is being built for this project and comprehensive tests were successfully accomplished at Fermilab’s telescope simulator (pictured above). … More »
The COUPP program puts a new twist on an old technology, bubble chambers, to search for dark matter. Recently, COUPP has been able to discriminate between potential dark matter signals and one of the most troublesome backgrounds, alpha decays, by listening to the sound of bubble formation – alphas are louder. Results showing this effect… More »
The COUPP program puts a new twist on an old technology, bubble chambers, to search for the dark matter that physicists think constitutes the majority of the matter in the Universe. Recently, COUPP has been able to discriminate between potential dark matter signals and one of the most troublesome backgrounds, alpha decays, by listening to… More »
The project is called the Sloan Bright Arcs Survey and is mostly people from Fermilab: Sahar Allam, James Annis, Tom Diehl, Josh Frieman, Liz Buckley-Geer, Jiangang Hao, Huan Lin, Marcelle Soares-Santos, and Doug Tucker. We search images of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey for objects that we think are possible strong lenses. We then confirm… More »