Dark matter ‘no result’ comes under fire

Published in Physics World, 6 May 2010

A war of words has broken out in the dark-matter community over a report posted on the arXiv preprint server earlier this week. The preprint from the XENON100 collaboration poured cold water on claims that dark matter has been detected by two other experiments – but now the report itself has been attacked by other researchers in the field.

On Monday the XENON100 collaboration published an analysis of the first experimental results from its dark-matter detector. It reported no evidence of dark matter, the substance thought to constitute over 80% of mass in the universe. The experiment covered a similar parameter range as dark-matter searches DAMA and CoGeNT, which have previously claimed possible evidence for dark matter. As a result, the XENON100 team concluded that both the DAMA and CoGeNT evidence could be excluded. […]

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