An early Christmas present?

摘要

As The Economist went to press this week, physicists were aflutter about an expected announcement from one of the world's most important experiments searching for dark matter-the as-yet-undetected material that, if models of the universe are correct, is about six times as abundant as the familiar, visible stuff. Physicists working on the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS), a large collaboration whose experimental apparatus is located in Minnesota, will be making presentations on December 17th at Fermilab and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in America, and on December 18th at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva. The speculation is that they will announce the detection of the hitherto unknown particles that makernup dark matter. The researchers plan to post their results to the arxiv, an online repository of physics papers, on December 17th, with submissions to a peer-reviewed journal following shortly thereafter.