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The DarkSide-50 detector has, for the first time, searched for superheavy dark matter particles that leave multiple tracks.
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A bullet that doesn't just pierce one target but leaves marks in several layers of armor. That's roughly how superheavy dark matter behaves, and it's what the DarkSide-50 detector was built to catch for the first time. The usual suspects for dark matter (weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs) pass through matter almost unnoticed, occasionally bumping into a nucleus. But nuclear superheavy dark matter could be made of many dark nucleons, scattering again and again as it flies through the detector.
The DarkSide-50 detector is filled with liquid argon and works like a highly sensitive camera, recording flashes of light and electrical signals from particle interactions. To catch these elusive multiple collisions, the team used 532 days of low-background data. They accounted for the fact that particles coming from below lose energy as they travel through the Earth, and they tuned the event selection specifically for the topology of multiple scattering.
As a result, they obtained limits on the scattering cross section of superheavy dark matter off nucleons for dark nucleon masses of 10, 50, 100, and 500 GeV/c². This isn't a discovery, but it's an important step: now we know how strongly such particles could interact with ordinary matter, if they exist. The search goes on, and each new experiment narrows the space of hypotheses about the nature of dark matter.
Dark matter neither emits nor absorbs light, so it can't be seen directly. Scientists catch it by indirect signs: its gravitational influence on galaxies or rare collisions with nuclei in detectors.
The DarkSide-50 detector sits in the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy, beneath a thick layer of rock that shields it from cosmic rays and reduces background.