Second Place Is Still a Podium Finish

After what seemed to be a too-short holiday vacation, I'm back in the laboratory making science happen. And of course that means that I'm also back in the office trying to find cool stuff to post on this blog. When I was looking around on Sciencenews.org this morning, the featured story, which I would definitely consider 'cool stuff,' was about the possibility of dark matter being detected from a mine in Minnesota. However, when I returned to the website this afternoon, the feature had changed to the recently released videos from the Cassini probe that is currently studying Saturn. Images sent back to Earth by the probe have been converted into short movies showing some of the notable events of Saturn's moons under the backdrop of Saturn and its rings by the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS). The videos are pretty amazing.

Now, back to the original story that I found. Dark matter has been the focus of much research recently, with the main goal being to physically detect it (or at least its presence). A group of researchers, many of whom hailed from Fermilab, built a detector that would identify the presence of a particular type of dark matter called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). It was thought that the WIMPs would occasionally pass through the detector, vibrationally exciting the Germanium nuclei within, creating an observable signal transduction event. Analysis of such events have resulted in the tentative conclusion that WIMPs are responsible for the signals, although there is a 23% chance that the signals were instead from background radiation within the mine.

Although their conclusions are somewhat premature, we should probably give this research group some slack considering the signal transduction events are extremely rare (it is thought that, at most, a WIMP would contact the detector once or twice a year). Also, it's exciting to see big news like this coming out of Fermilab. They have, after all, been upstaged by CERN's particle accelerator, the LHC. You'll remember that in a previous post, I mentioned that the LHC had reached a power of 1.18 trillion electronvolts, making it the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world. That title was stripped from Fermilab's Tevatron particle accelerator, which had held the record of being the largest and most powerful accelerator since it became operational in 1983. The machine has also led to major discoveries of elementary particles during its lifetime that have come to be staples of subatomic physics research and education. Despite its rich history, however, the Tevatron must soon go the way of Old Yeller. Because even though second place is a podium finish, in the world of particle accelerators it just means that you're obsolete. So Fermilab is in the process of shutting down their landmark accelerator.

And with New Year's eve right around the corner, it may be appropriate to raise our glasses to the Tevatron, for its many years of proud service.