Indiana University South Bend wins grant money to fund dark matter research
SOUTH BEND — When it comes to one of the biggest mysteries in the universe, the dark matter particle, Indiana University South Bend professor of physics and astronomy Ilan Levine is on the case.
The university is part of a consortium of 19 universities around the world that are working to detect dark matter particles — invisible, unhindered particles that are estimated to make up 85 percent of the mass of the universe.
The consortium, called the PICO project, was formed after the combination of two groups that were conducting experiments for the dark matter particle, the PICASSO project and the COUP project (hence, PICO). In an Ontario mine shaft a mile underneath the surface, the team is preparing to start up a bubble chamber which is designed to detect the bubbles created by the collision of the dark matter particle and an atom.
Its current unit, called the PICO-40, is set to begin testing soon. But the PICO-500, ten times larger than the PICO-40 and therefore more likely to detect an “event” from the collision between a dark matter particle and an atom, is tentatively planned to begin testing in 2020.
That project just received another boost, through a $770,500 grant split between Indiana University South Bend, Penn State and Northeastern Illinois University from the National Science Foundation to help fund the development of the PICO-500.
The IUSB team, composed of Levine, four students and engineer Ed Behnke, focuses on developing a system as a part of the experiment that measures the sound of the bubble. The process helps determine the difference between bubbles created by radioactivity rather than an atom’s collision with dark matter. Levine said that previous bubble chamber tests observed about 200 “events” a day, but that “thus far, nearly all of it has been from radioactivity,” Levine said.
Inside the lab in the basement of Northside Hall, Levine and one of his students, Alexandria Weesner, point out the different electronics they’re working on for the PICO-500.
Weesner, a junior and physics major, recently completed a summer program at Louisiana State University, where a lab detects gravitational waves that could forever change the way we observe the universe.
The other three students who work in the lab are Trace Karnitz, Paige Oedekerk and Nathan Walkowski.
For Levine, post-doctoral work at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, also called SNOLAB, helped to lay the foundation that would lead to his research on the dark matter particle.
SNOLAB researches neutrinos, a product of the nuclear fusion from the Sun, and in 2015 researchers there won the Nobel Prize in Physics. The same nickel copper mine in Ontario that houses SNOLAB is now the site of the PICO-40.
But following his post-doctoral work, Levine wanted to find another physics problem to tackle.
“When I transferred to a faculty position here, I wanted to know what are the most pressing, interesting and fascinating problems in physics,” Levine said.
And that led Levine to the mystery of dark matter. In 1933, Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky calculated that the Coma Cluster, a group of more than 1,000 galaxies, had likely 400 times more mass than was visually observable. The discovery suggested that there was some other form of matter adding mass to the cluster, Zwicky called dark matter.
But it wasn’t until the 1970s that more evidence was provided to support the existence of dark matter, when Vera Rubin and Kent Ford further confirmed Zwicky’s findings through observation of specific galaxies, where the speed of rotation wouldn’t be possible without mass that wasn’t observable.
Despite those observations of the effects of a mysterious form of matter, the specific evidence of a singular dark matter particle has yet to be proven. Right now, when it comes to dark matter, there are more unknowns than knowns. and that’s what the team at IUSB, and the larger PICO program, is working to help change.