Did we just discover dark matter?

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25:53And we're back. And Daniel has just told us about the evidence we have for the existence of dark matter, but it's hard to find. So Daniel, just because something is hard doesn't mean scientists threw up their hands and give up. What have we tried to look at it? So we know that dark matter is out there. We know how much of it there is in terms of mass. We know roughly where it is, but we don't know what it's made out of. Like everything we've ever seen has been made out of particles. So we think, well, maybe dark matter is also made out of particles. And that's a maybe, right? Let's say that honestly and upfront, that's a guess.

26:27And it's not necessarily a well-justified guess. We're extrapolating from an unrepresentative corner of the universe, normal matter, atoms, et cetera, which make up 5 % of the universe and saying, maybe the rules we learned here apply everywhere. And that hasn't gone well historically. The rules of motion on Earth don't apply everywhere because it turns out the rules are different at high speeds or near black holes or whatever. But it's also a reasonable starting place. Physics is usually, let's try the dumbest thing first. That didn't work. Okay, let's try the second dumbest thing. Let's be lazy about it and build up.

27:02Because you don't want to start with complexity. Start with the simplest thing. So the simplest idea is maybe it's a particle and maybe it has some kind of interaction with our matter. Again, an assumption. Because earlier we said we know dark matter feels gravity. We don't know that it feels anything else. So it might be that dark matter is a particle, but it only feels gravity. In which case, we probably will never figure out what it's made out of. Because an individual particle's gravity is basically zero. And here, again, I'm saying we have a lot of confidence that dark matter is a thing and that it's out there and it has mass, but we've never seen it and we might not be able to.

27:36Those two things are not in conflict. What I mean is that we know it's out there in a bulk sense, but we don't know what it's made out of, and we may not figure that out. But you don't just throw up your hands. You say, well, let's assume that it does have some kind of interaction. What if it has some kind of interaction with normal matter that's not gravity, some new kind of dark force? So now we're adding complexity. We're saying not just that there's dark matter out there, but what if there's some new force we've never observed before that lets dark matter interact with normal matter? Gosh, where do you even start to like figure out how to measure that if it's happening?

28:09Yeah, well, what you do is you look to see if dark matter is interacting with normal matter. And one way to do that is to try to make dark matter. So that's the kind of thing that I worked on for like 10 years. If dark matter interacts with normal matter, that means that sometimes when you smash normal matter together, you will produce dark matter. Because what happens at a collider is you don't have to know in advance what you're trying to make. It's not like chemistry, like you have a cookbook and you're rearranging stuff from ingredients into cookies, right? It's alchemy. At the collider, we do alchemy.

28:40We create new kinds of stuff and it doesn't have to have the remnants of the old kind of stuff. We annihilate quarks and anti-quarks. It turns into a gluon, and then it can turn into anything that gluon's coupled to. Or it turns into a photon, and then it can turn into anything the photon's coupled to, or anything z-boson's coupled to, et cetera. So if there's some new kind of particle out there, like a dark photon, maybe you annihilate quarks and antiquarks, and it turns into a dark photon, and then that turns into dark matter. So that's the kind of thing we were hoping to see at the Large Hadron Collider.

29:11And I have a great track record of picking experiments that don't win Nobel Prizes, and so we didn't see anything. And I didn't win a Nobel Prize. It would have been so awesome to make it in the lab and be able to study it and produce it at will. So awesome. Because then you're not dependent on things like, well, I think there's a dark matter wind. Let me try to spot it. You're like, I'm just going to make it here in the lab. And that's the awesome power of the collider. But we haven't seen anything. And so that's been disappointing. Another thing you can do is try to reverse that and say, well, look, if you could smash quarks and anti-quarks together and make a dark photon, which turns into dark matter, what about the opposite?

29:48What happens when two dark matter particles smash into each other? Sometimes they should produce a dark photon, which should turn into quarks and anti-quarks. Basically, the inverse of what we're hoping to happen at the collider should happen out there in the universe if there's dark matter banging into other dark matter. And if dark matter is anything like, I mean, so like assuming that it would make anti-quarks is an assumption. Yes, exactly. So we got a couple assumptions here. One, it's a particle. to it has some kind of interaction with normal matter that couples to quarks or maybe electrons or something we can see.

30:21Both of those are just guesses, guesses that we have to make to make this whole experimental program feasible. And so you might think, well, you're just guessing. Well, that's true. But again, it's a reasonable guess and it's all we can do. So let's hit those nails with a hammer because the hammer is all we got. Yeah, sure. Reasonable place to start. And so where might this happen? Well, most of the dark matter in the galaxy is in the center of the galaxy, because that's where most of the gravity is. And so, it's a big blob in the center of the galaxy. So, if sometimes dark matter bumps into other dark matter to make normal matter, you expect it to happen mostly in the center of the galaxy.

30:55And we have special space telescopes trained on the center of the galaxy looking for just this. And one of them is called the Fermi-Latt telescope. It's basically a particle detector in space that looks for high-energy particles from the center of the galaxy. We also look for it in Antarctica. So, we talked about ice cubes sometimes, which is a cubic kilometer of ice in Antarctica that's been instrumented with cameras. And if you have dark matter that comes through the earth and interacts and makes a muon, you could see that in the ice. All sorts of ways to look for this. This is really, really hard because we don't understand the center of the galaxy very well.

31:32It's filled with all sorts of mysteries, black holes and radiation and all sorts of crazy stuff happening. So if you see a signal from the center of the galaxy, it might be dark matter, but it might just be like, oh, it turns out you don't understand the center of the galaxy. So it's a very tough thing to do. Worth doing, but a tough thing to do. And they've seen all sorts of signals in the last 10 years. And then each time they're like, oh, this turns out to be a quasar, or this turns out to be a pulsar, or this turns out to be something else. Because the universe is filled with super weird stuff, which is fun.

32:01And you're going to learn a lot of astrophysics, but they've never seen any dark matter. And one thing that's presumably nice about these experiments is that even if you don't get the answer you were looking for, you've learned something. Oh, yeah. Right. Absolutely. So these are all designed to teach you something, maybe not what you were expecting, but at the end, the money is spent. You've learned more about the universe, even if it wasn't what you thought. For sure. And both of these directions are very general. Like, we don't just build the LHC to look for dark matter. We use it to look for all sorts of stuff.

32:28It's done great physics. We build these telescopes to look at the center of the galaxy and to look for dark matter and other stuff. So we've learned a lot from Fermilab. It's been a fantastic success, despite not finding dark matter. Now, the third category are much more specialized. This we call direct detection. And this is where we got the really exciting result from. These are experiments designed expressly to see dark matter. And their goal is to detect this dark matter wind. They're saying if we're flying through a wind of dark matter, and that dark matter can interact with normal matter in some way, then eventually we should see it.

33:02You should see dark matter bumping into normal matter, right? If the two interact and you have a wind, you should literally feel it. Should you smell dark matter wind as well? Sorry. She who smelt it dealt it. That's the rule in physics. Oh, that's also the rule in biology. I guess we're not so different after all. There's some common ground. And the problem is that it's hard to feel it because it's very weak, right? The way that you can't really feel neutrinos. There's trillions of neutrinos passing through your body all the time, but you don't really notice. You're not like beaten down by the neutrino radiation because they mostly pass right through you because the interaction between a neutrino and your matter is very, very weak.

33:43And I sometimes hear people say it's because neutrinos have low mass. It's not. Or because neutrinos are super duper small. It's not. It's about the strength of the interaction. When two particles come near each other, there's a chance that they interact. And that depends on how strong the interaction is. If it's very strong, like electromagnetism, you know it's pretty much going to happen. If it's very, very weak, like the weak force, then it happens 1 in 10 to the 20 times. So it's a quantum mechanical probability that depends on the strength of the interaction. So the idea is, well, how do you see something that's very, very gentle and very, very rare?

34:18And the strategy is to filter out everything else. So you get a really big tank of liquid xenon, something which is already very quiet, so it's not making a lot of noise. It should just sit there inert and do nothing. and you put it like a mile underground, so it's not getting bombarded by cosmic radiation from space, right? Cosmic rays and high energy particles. So in principle, it should just sit there. It should be totally quiet. It should be totally inert. You should never see anything. But if dark matter passes through all that rock and gets to your detector, it should occasionally bump into one of those particles and you should see it.

34:56So if you build a huge vat of quiet liquid underground, it's sort of like a camera for seeing really rare particles that really weakly interact. And so what would a weak interaction between dark matter and xenon look like? Yeah. So it would just bump a xenon nucleus, right? We call it a nuclear recoil. It would just bang against it. And it would give off a little flash of light because that nuclear recoil is getting some energy and then it gives up that energy and also can lose electrons. And so you look for that flash of light and you look for those electrons. And that's how you tell that one of your xenons got bumped.

35:34Now, the chances of a xenon getting bumped is really small because the dark matter coming through rolls a die that has 10 to the 20 sides on it. And it has to get a one. But you've got lots of xenon. So the bigger your tank of xenon, the more rolls you get on that huge die. And eventually, you might get one. Okay. And what else could get through all of that Earth? Do we think that only dark matter could get there? Great question, because it's not like you see one, you know you found dark matter. There are other ways to see xenon get bumped. So we're pretty sure that the cosmic ray background is almost zero, right?

36:09Because you've got like a mile of shielding of rock, but not exactly zero, right? Everything is a probability. Also, the rock is radioactive. Like there's some trace uranium and whatever, and that emits particles. And sometimes you're going to see that. You're going to get neutrons or whatever. or some other particle decays radioactively and gives you a gamma ray. So they've thought very carefully about that, and they've designed the detector specifically so they can try to identify whether a flash came from one of these other sources or whether it looks like it came from dark matter. Tell me more, Daniel.

36:41And so the experiment we're talking about today is called the LZ experiment, and it has seven tons of ultra-pure liquid xenon, and it's a mile underground in an old gold mine in Lead, South Dakota. It's called the Surf Lab, which is some other tortured acronym I don't remember. And it's a really cool device. Finally, there's a fun acronym and you don't know what it stands for. Well, I'm pretty sure they're not doing any surfing in South Dakota. In landlocked South Dakota. Yeah, probably not. So it definitely qualifies for a tortured acronym. Okay. And they've designed this experiment specifically to give them handles so they can answer questions like, is this likely to have been a neutron?

37:21Is this likely to have been a radioactive decay? Or does this look like dark matter? And so it's a massive tank of xenon, but it's also surrounded by a tank of water. And the tank of water is there to suppress cosmic rays. So like any muon that makes it through that rock is going to go through that water and leave a flash. Cosmic ray muons are moving really, really fast. They'll leave a little flash in that water and you'll see it. So it's like a veto. If you see something give a flash in your outside water tank, then you're pretty sure it's not going to be dark matter. You just throw that away.

37:53And then they have a layer of something called gadolinium, which is really good at seeing neutrons. It's like super duper reactive to neutrons. So if you have neutrons that come in and bump your xenon atom, you'll also see a flash in your gadolinium. And so you'd be like, oh no, that was just a neutron. Clever. We also have two ways to measure the flash. They call them S1 and S2. Brilliant names, scientists. Way to go, physicist. Yeah. S1 is that flash of light you get when the xenon bumps, right? So the xenon gets some energy, then it dumps some energy into a photon. It's a flash of scintillation light.

38:27And they have the whole tank of xenon surrounded by cameras to capture those flashes. Then also the electrons that have gotten stripped off the xenon by the nuclear recoil, they drift upwards because there's a whole electric field in the thing. And the time it takes the electron to drift upward tells you how far it drifted, which tells you roughly where it happened. Wow. Plus - This is awesome. Yeah, it's super cool. This is like really clever, multiple levels of cleverness. And this is many generations in. They started out with one idea and it worked, but they're like, ooh, this is really hard to tell apart from neutrons.

38:58Let's add its other layer. So this is the benefit of lots of experience of knowing what goes wrong and designing exactly an experiment the next time to make it more precise. And another really cool trick is that you can look at the ratio of S1, which is that first flash of light, and S2, which is from the electrons that drift upwards. And if you get a lot more energy in S2 from the electrons, then you know that probably what was hit was the electron cloud around your xenon atom and not the nucleus itself. Okay. Because then you're getting a lot more energy in those electrons. And that's really useful information because things like gamma rays or anything that has electric charge, if it hits a xenon atom, it's going to hit those electrons.

39:41Whereas a WIMP, like a dark matter particle, it's not going to hit those electrons because it doesn't have electric charge. It's going to hit the nucleus and it's going to bang against those quarks. And so what you're looking for, if you want to find something that hit the nucleus, is more energy in that first flash and less in that electron splash. Wow. So you got lots of handles here to figure out what's dark matter, what's your typical background, etc., etc. So they did a lot of work to try to understand this. So you said there's like literal tons of xenon. Yeah. Where does one get literally tons of xenon?

40:15This turns out to be one of the limiting factors because xenon is really rare. It's like 0.00001 % of Earth's atmosphere. And the whole global production of xenon is 40 tons per year. Oh, wow. So if you want seven tons of xenon, it's like a significant fraction of all the xenon available to all industry on Earth every year. And that's like a huge fraction of the budget. So they spent$70 million on this liquid xenon for LZ. And they couldn't buy it all in one year. They had to stage it over several years. They have special contracts with these producers. Like, please ramp up your production. We're going to need this amount.

40:57Because you can't just enter the market and be like, oh, we need 25 % of the whole market this year. So they have these contracts. It's a whole thing. Liquid xenon is excellent for dark matter detection because it's massive and it's inert. It also turns out to be really good for aerospace and electronics and semiconductor industry. They use xenon gas for plasma etching to precisely etch nanoscale features on the silicon wafers. In aerospace, they like it because it's a great fuel. Like we talked about ion thrusters, they use liquid xenon, right? You want these big, massive ions. So there are other places that need liquid xenon, very reasonable, and they don't like it when the scientists come in and be like, we're taking all of it this year, by the way.

41:37So that turns out to be quite complicated, yeah. Yeah. But once you've got it, do you need to replenish it or are you you just you've got it and then you're good for forever? You've got it and you're mostly good. This is going to be a little bit of leakage. So you've got to top up occasionally. But no, you don't need to have a continuous budget for buying liquid xenon. And that's the challenge for this industry is that they're like, we're going to come in with a huge order and then we're going to disappear. So they're like, well, we're not going to ramp up our production and then we're going to be left with all the xenon nobody wants.

42:04Right. So it's a challenge for the industry to respond to that. But this has been done. It has been done. It does exist. Yeah. And it's this escalation. They started out these detectors with a fraction of a ton. Then the next generation was like the one ton. And this is the many ton. And people are talking about 100 ton versions of this stuff. Oh, wow. And there's several of these detectors around the world. The one we're talking about today is the LZ. But there's a competing experiment called the Xenon Experiment. And there's another one in China called Panda X. And they all need their own 5 to 10 tons.

42:36And they're all talking about a hundred ton version of this thing. Wow. And so it's complicated. It sounds like anybody who's looking for a business proposition should get into Xenon production. I'm not pumping shares in Xenon stock yet, but yeah, it's important stuff and expensive. All right, well, let's take a break. And when we get back, we will talk about the data set and what we saw.

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47:35okay so the lz which is part of the surf project if i'm getting all of these connections correct saw something exciting yeah first how long did they have to make measurements before they saw something possibly exciting yeah so it's like the lhc where you build this thing but you're not running it all the time because sometimes you're working on it and you want it to be operating really, really well. So they have various data sets. And this data set we're talking about today was taken between March of 2023 and April of 2024. So that's already two years ago. And they spent two years analyzing this data, understanding this data, developing their models of the background, figuring out how to select events to make sure they get dark matter, they don't cut out any dark matter events, they don't get drowned in the background.

48:19It's really important. And what's really important about it is designing it before you look at the data. In the end, we're going to do statistics on like a handful of numbers. Like we see one, we expect zero. We see two, we expect one. You really have to make sure you're not biasing yourself. It's very, very easy to design an experiment to get the result you want if you already know where the data are, right? It's like predicting the stock market after already looking at it. It's not very impressive, right? It's not a measure of your ability to predict the stock market. So what they do is they call salt the data.

48:51They put a bunch of fake data in with the real data, like fake dark matter and fake this and fake the other things, so that nobody is biased by what they're seeing. Because nobody knows which is real. And they design the analysis techniques without looking at the actual clean data set until the very, very end, until they're very, very short. Because you only get one try. Once you've seen the data set, you can't change how you're analyzing it. You can't say, anything in this box, we're going to call a dark matter candidate, and we're going to predict the number of other things that might fall in that box and then see a candidate just outside the box and be like, oh, we're going to change the box.

49:25We're going to grow the box to get that one thing, right? You cannot sculpt your analysis technique after you've seen the data. So that's why it takes two years because they have a single shot. They've worked on this experiment for like a decade. They're not wasting their one chance at the data to have a fresh statistical look. So this data that we're talking about today is like 220 live days. And the exciting thing is they have more data. They haven't yet analyzed. So that's always cool. Yeah. Cause then you can run your analysis multiple times on the data and like increase your confidence. Well, you can get fresh data.

49:58That's the most important thing. You don't want to reanalyze old data. You want to answer questions in new data. And that's going to be very exciting because what happened when they opened up the data was very exciting for two reasons. One is they saw something. So a lot of these experiments they run, they see nothing, like not anything, everything they see, they're confident in his background, so they have these very restrictive selection requirements to remove all of that. And left in what they call their signal region, candidates for dark matter is zero. That's very compelling, but also disappointing.

50:30It's very underwhelming to go to a whole presentation to hear about this incredible engineering and then be like, we saw nothing. It's like space balls. We ain't found shit. But it is an answer, but it's not the science answer you want, right? So the exciting thing is they saw something. Oh my gosh, there's an event in there. And it's very hard to explain how they would see anything but dark matter, because they're very, very good at removing radioactive background sources, at vetoing neutrons, at vetoing gamma rays. What this looks like is looks very, very, very much like a dark matter. Like the nuclear recoil energy is very large and the electron flash is much smaller.

51:11So it's exactly in the place you would expect dark matter. So it's a very interesting, very compelling event. And they went through in their presentation and talked about all the possible sources of background and calculated how likely is it that this is this source of background, or we're seeing a neutrino, or we're seeing a neutron, or we're seeing a radioactive decay. And all of those are very, very tiny, but non-zero probabilities. And that's the crux of the issue is we have a single event. All we know about it are these two numbers, S1 and S2. And we can calculate the probability that it came from something boring, some prosaic explanation, and that's never zero.

51:48And anytime you have one event, you're like, well, I mean, what does it mean, right? One event, it could just be good luck, bad luck. It could be anything. But the other thing about this is that it's a very weird event. It's very, very high energy. If we were seeing the dark matter wind, you expect to see a lot of events at lower energy and very few at these very high energies. And so to see one at very high energy and none at low energy, that's weird. It's not what we expected to see from dark matter. What does that mean? So, of course, the first thing that happened when they put this result out was that the theory community came out with like a flurry of papers all trying to explain what this is.

52:30And I was amazed. I mean, even in these days of AI, like some of those papers were posted hours after the result came out. So, like, maybe there was some leaks or maybe people, like, had their models ready for no matter what they posted. And they're like, oh, okay, it's this one. Or maybe they generated it with AI in five hours. I don't know. But one possibility that people initially were attracted to is a theory of dark matter called a Higgsino. Well, that's cute. I like that. Yeah, it is kind of cute. Yeah. Well, Eno, you know, is like cute and little. and the Higgs-eno is a hypothetical particle that's related to the Higgs.

53:09And you might remember we talked about supersymmetry. That's this idea that every particle we know about has a partner particle, the way that like every charged particle has an antiparticle. This is like a different symmetry and different kind of reflection. And every particle we know about that's a boson has a partner particle where you add an eno to it. So like photon is a photino, and the Z has a xeno, and the W is a wino particle. And the Higgs is a Higgsino particle. And so the idea is maybe this is a Higgsino. Maybe this is a supersymmetric version of a Higgs boson. And there's a whole theory about the spectrum of dark matter masses that would explain this particular event.

53:50So a Higgsino would give the same S1 and S2 signal as dark matter? And is this, this wasn't something that we anticipated before we got the result? Yes, it would give this signature. And it wasn't the leading candidate. It was something that was out there. It's like on the spectrum of ideas, but it wasn't the most expected thing. It wasn't like the most vanilla. You know, this is like the slightly spicy jalapeno version of dark matter. But this would make more sense with the, you said there's no wind that came along with it. And so dark matter would have the wind, but the Higgsino would be windless?

54:27It would just explain why we saw it at high energy rather than seeing it at low energy first. Okay. A particular kind of dark matter that interacts in this way. So that's really exciting, but that only lasted for like a couple of days because then people were thinking, well, if it is a Higgsino, you should also see this other kind of events at even higher energy and they don't see any of that. And so that theory like lasted 24 hours. And now there's other ideas people have. In the hallways here at Irvine, there's a lot of talk every day about what the latest theories are and what the papers are.

54:58There's like a proliferation of theories out there to explain this, which is a lot of fun. And this is how science should work. You get ideas. You get competing ideas. It's a scientific conversation, like live. It's out there for anybody to participate in, which I think is cool. But also, we should remember it's a single observation. We saw one thing. It's like the wow signal. We saw this one burp from space and never repeated. And it makes it really hard to know, was it aliens? Was it some weird hiccup in hydrogen somewhere? You really need something to repeat in order to understand it. If you just get one weird blip, it's like when you're walking down the street and you have a sudden pain in one joint.

55:40And you're like, uh-oh. But then it never happens again. You forget about it. You're like, well, I'm just going to move on with my life. Single things can just be weird, random outliers. So that's why it's really exciting that they have more data they haven't looked at yet. If this is dark matter and it's real, then it should happen regularly, right? And so if you have four times as much data and you look at your new data, you should see it four times as often, right? There's going to be fluctuations. But if this is dark matter, when they look at their new data, they should see more examples. It should start to add up.

56:15It should start to pile up, right? As you get more and more data. Plus, we have experiments around the world. We have one in Italy. We have one in China. All are sensitive to the same things using very similar technology, but not exactly so they can cross-check each other. We should start to see it in those data sets. So if this is real, then in the next couple of years, it'll become overwhelming evidence that we're seeing something new, something massive, something that interacts like dark matter. And we'll be able to measure its mass. We'll know something about how much of it there is. We'll be able to cross-check that against our calculations for the thing we think is explaining all the gravity that we don't understand.

56:52And if that all agrees, then we'd be like, wow, look, we found an example of dark matter interacting. So it would be a new particle and a new force at the same time. Oh, my gosh. It would be super exciting. All right. So I have two questions. One, this sounds very exciting. And given your history, this suggests that you were invited to be part of one of these projects and you must have turned it down. And that's why it's heading towards a Nobel. Is that true? Did you turn down this project at some point? You know, your historical reenactment is actually correct. Yes. Oh, no, Daniel. I know. I keep making this true.

57:26That's three Nobel prizes you've turned down. I'm going to set a record or something. Yeah, well, you know, when I went to grad school, there's a whole set of options for what to pursue in particle physics. Collider physics, neutrino physics, dark matter physics, gravitational wave physics. And as a grad student, you got to choose. And you don't really know. Like, you're a baby scientifically. You don't know how to evaluate these things. You just trust your gut and say, like, this seems cool. And I thought colliders were pretty cool. Yeah. But yeah, dark matter. I had the option to join these dark matter experiments and do a PhD on those.

57:58And I said no. And the reason is that these experiments are really, really, really good at one thing. So they have their one measurement of dark matter. And that's cool. But, like, 500 people all working on one thing felt claustrophobic to me. The thing about colliders is you can do lots of different stuff. You can look for dark matter. You can look for Higgs. You can look for anything. That's really cool and exciting. And so, but, you know, we didn't find anything and they did. So they put all their money on black and it looks like they might be winning. Well, here's my second question. So you said that their observation was consistent with dark matter, but it wasn't exactly what we expected to see.

58:33Yeah. If you get, I don't know, four events that all look exactly the same, which is to say consistent with dark matter, but not exactly what you expected, what does that tell you? Yeah, great. So that's the next step, number one, is think about the statistics of it. Like we said, it's very unlikely to be anything else. It's not impossible. And we can actually calculate very precisely what the chances are of seeing this if it wasn't dark matter. And that's really important. Every time we make an observation, we can never look and say, look, here's a Higgs boson. Here's a dark matter. Remember, we're always seeing indirect evidence for it.

59:08And there are other explanations that align with that evidence. So we have to calculate what's the probability of seeing this if it wasn't this new exciting thing. That's the most important number. And in this case, it's about a half a percent. So the chances of this happening without dark matter are half a percent, which is like small enough to get exciting, but not small enough to say anything definitively. In particle physics, we wait for like one in three and a half million before we say, okay, this is something real. And the way to get there is to see more examples, as you said. So if we see four of them and we expected 0.001, then that number, the chances of seeing four events when you expect zero is close to a threshold for discovery.

59:49And then we can start answering your question, which is like, what does that tell us? If this is not the kind of dark matter we expected, it tells us something about what dark matter is, how it interacts, what mass it has. And then we start to get to play all sorts of fun games about, well, how many different kinds of particles of dark matter are there? How do they interact with each other? It's a whole new regime of dark matter particle physics that we can start to do. And remember that this is most of the universe. Everything we've ever studied is a little slice of the pie. And so it might be that the rest of it explained by one boring particle, but it might be rich and complex and have all sorts of crazy stuff going on in there.

1:00:27And we are just beginning to dive into that pool. So there's so much exciting stuff happening in the next 10 years, 50 years in dark matter particle physics if we keep funding this stuff, if we decide we're going to spend the tiniest fraction of our money on understanding the universe. And there's nothing that Daniel is more excited about than a result we didn't expect. Yes. And so I think you're probably excited that we found evidence of dark matter. But the fact that it wasn't exactly what we thought must really keep you up at night. Yeah. Oh, it's wonderful. It's so fun. You know, the worst case scenario is that they open the box on their next data sets and there's nothing there.

1:01:07Yeah. And that would mean that probably this was just a fluctuation. It was just a fluke. And that kind of stuff happens. I have seen crazy things in our data, which then just disappear like a mirage when you add more data. It's like if you flip a coin and you get four heads in a row, you're like, whoa, something weird is happening. And then the next hundred flips are balanced 50-50. And you're like, well, I guess it was just a fluctuation. The problem is that if you look often enough, you will see fluctuations. And so you have to even account for that. So when we do our statistics and we say, how likely is this to have been something boring, which mimics an exciting signal?

1:01:41We also account for the number of places we've looked for a signal because the more places you look for a signal, like the more monkeys you have banging on the typewriter, the more likely you are to get Shakespeare, not from Shakespeare. Yeah. So even that is accounted for in our statistics. So the data that they used for this observation were from March 2023 to April 2024. So that means it's been like two years since. Like, could next week, they tell us, that result from the next two years? Because they could just, like, clean it up and run the same stats package? You'd think that they should be able to do that.

1:02:14It's complicated because the detector performance is constantly changing. You know, oh, this thing didn't work that day. This thing didn't work that day. Or it was hotter or it was colder. So your background models have to adapt to all of that. Okay. And your analysis machinery does. And then your software changes. And so, like, it sounds straightforward, but it turns out there's a zillion details. And because you only get one look, you better get it right. And this is the difference between discovering it, having conclusive evidence for dark matter, which is a guaranteed Nobel Prize, and messing it up and losing out to some other experiment, which is going to win the Nobel Prize.

1:02:49And so they're going to be cautious. They can't be too cautious because if they wait too long, they're going to get scooped by the Chinese or the Italians. But if they go too fast, they're going to stumble and lose the race. So they're not taking a lot of vacations right now. All right. Well, it'll be exciting to keep an eye on what happens in the coming weeks, months or years. If you had to put your money on it, Daniel, do you think do you think this is going to pan out? I think there's about half a percent chance that this is a fluctuation. Oh, you're statistical. Yeah. All right. So that's a pretty good chance that it's something real.

1:03:21You can't say that probably that that was dark matter. All sorts of Bayesian statistics complications there. But I have a hunch this one feels good, but I'm famous for having bad hunches. Well, I think this is super exciting. I can't wait to see what the result is from the next two years of data. Me too. Really looking forward to it.

1:03:46Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and XDNKUniverse. Come engage with us. You can email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. We really do want to hear from you. And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

1:04:25And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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