UF physicists part of effort toward first-ever detection of dark matter

Despite estimating that dark matter makes up approximately 85% of all the universe’s matter, scientists know very little about the invisible substance. But an experiment based in a lab in Sudbury, Canada, has taken a step toward potentially recording the first detections of dark matter particles.

A team including Tarek Saab, Ph.D., professor of physics at the University of Florida, constructed and installed the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or SuperCDMS, SNOLAB, which started collecting data earlier this month.

“The concept of dark matter has been around for 100 years, but then seriously pursued for the last 50 or 40 years,” said Saab, who served as a spokesperson of the collaboration from 2022 to 2024 and led the SuperCDMS group at UF for the past 20 years. “A detection would be a significant achievement. That's not to say that this experiment is guaranteed to make a detection, but this is kind of the start of a search.”

A single detection of an event in the experiment wouldn’t necessarily mean it observed dark matter. The team would aim to collect data for more than a year and then analyze it to determine if they detected dark matter particles.

Saab said success for the experiment could be interpreted in a couple ways. Ideally, the detector would show evidence of dark matter, but even if it doesn’t, there can be positives to the project. Operating the experiment as designed could eliminate possibilities in the search for dark matter particles.

This experiment, which was under construction for about a decade, is the successor to a generation that was located deep underground in the Soudan mine in Minnesota. SNOLAB is located about two kilometers underground in Vale Creighton Mine in Canada.

The SuperCDMS SNOLAB is a deeper and cleaner facility, protecting it from high energy cosmic ray particles and radioactive decay byproducts. It features a cryogenics system that maintains the detectors at a temperature near absolute zero, enabling the use of highly sensitive sensors based on superconducting elements.

“Part of the reason it's underground is to try to reduce the background (signals) as much as possible,” Saab said. “Being underground allows the intervening rock and soil to absorb a lot of these and decrease it to a manageable level.”

Much of the project’s financial support came from the National Science Foundation, but Saab has also received support from UF. In addition to Saab, graduate students David Sadek, Loida Del Rio Rosado and Nicholas Maldonado and postdoctoral researchers Moaaz Elwa and Matthew Wilson have collaborated on the experiment.