Dark matter hunters may get three new experiments

Guest post by Christopher Crockett

The hunt for dark matter, the exotic substance thought to bind galaxies together, just got a boost from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. On July 11, the U.S. funding agencies jointly announced approval for three experiments designed to catch dark matter particles.

Two of the experiments, LUX-ZEPLIN and SuperCDMS-SNOLAB, will look for collisions between one type of dark matter candidate, called WIMPs, and atoms of xenon and germanium, respectively. The Axion Dark Matter eXperiment will try to detect bursts of microwave light from another dark matter candidate: hypothetical subatomic particles called axions.