Tag: Jodi Cooley

SMU physicist and her students join national laboratories, other universities in high-stakes hunt for elusive dark matter

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date May 7, 2018

The future SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment will hunt for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), hypothetical components of dark matter. If a WIMP (white trace) strikes an atom inside the experiment's detector crystals (gray), it will cause the crystal lattice to vibrate (blue). The collision will also send electrons (red) through the crystal that enhance the vibrations. (Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

“One of our major concerns is background particles that can mimic the dark matter signature in our detectors.” — Jodi Cooley

SMU physicist Jodi Cooley is a member of the international scientific team that will use a powerful new tool to understand one of the biggest mysteries of modern physics.

The U.S. Department of Energy has approved funding and start of construction for SuperCDMS SNOLAB, a $34 million experiment designed to detect dark matter.

SuperCDMS will begin operations in the early 2020s to hunt for hypothetical dark matter particles called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs.

“Understanding the nature of dark matter is one of the most important scientific puzzles in particle astrophysics today,” said Cooley, an associate professor of experimental particle physics. “The experiment will have unprecedented sensitivity to dark matter particles that are hypothesized to have very low mass and interact very rarely. So they are extremely challenging to detect. This challenge has required us to develop cutting edge detectors.”

Cooley is one of 111 scientists from 26 institutions in the SuperCDMS collaboration. SMU graduate students on the experiment include Matt Stein (Ph.D. ’18) and Dan Jardin; and also previously Hang Qiu (Ph.D. ’17).

Physicists are searching for dark matter because although it makes up the bulk of the universe it remains a mystery. They theorize that dark matter could be composed of dark matter particles, with WIMPs a top contender for the title.

If dark matter WIMP particles exist, they would barely interact with their environment and fly right through regular matter. However, every so often, they could collide with an atom of our visible world, and dark matter researchers are looking for these rare interactions.

The SuperCDMS experiment will be the world’s most sensitive for detecting the relatively light WIMPs.

Cooley and her students in the SMU Department of Physics have been working with Washington-based Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on the challenge of background control and material selection for the experiment’s WIMP detectors.

Understanding background signals in the experiment is a major challenge for the detection of the faint WIMP signals.

“One of our major concerns is background particles that can mimic the dark matter signature in our detectors,” Cooley said. “As such, the experiment is constructed from radiopure materials that are carefully characterized through a screening and assay before they are selected.”

The SMU research team also has performed simulations of background particles in the detectors.

“Doing this helps inform the design of the experiment shield,” Cooley said. “We want to select the right materials to use in construction of the experiment. For example, materials that are too high in radioactivity will produce background particles that might produce fake dark matter signals in our detectors. We are extremely careful to use materials that block background particles. We also take great care that the material we use to hold the detectors in place — copper — is very radiopure.”

The experiment will be assembled and operated within the existing Canadian laboratory SNOLAB – 6,800 feet underground inside a nickel mine near the city of Sudbury. That’s the deepest underground laboratory in North America.

The experiment’s detectors will be protected from high-energy particles, called cosmic radiation, which can create the unwanted background signals that Cooley’s team wants to prevent.

SuperCDMS SNOLAB will be 50 times more sensitive than predecessor
Scientists know that visible matter in the universe accounts for only 15 percent of all matter. The rest is the mysterious substance called dark matter.

Due to its gravitational pull on regular matter, dark matter is a key driver for the evolution of the universe, affecting the formation of galaxies like our Milky Way. It therefore is fundamental to our very own existence.

The SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment will be at least 50 times more sensitive than its predecessor, exploring WIMP properties that can’t be probed by other experiments.

The search will be done using silicon and germanium crystals, in which the collisions would trigger tiny vibrations. However, to measure the atomic jiggles, the crystals need to be cooled to less than minus 459.6 degrees Fahrenheit — a fraction of a degree above absolute zero temperature.

The ultra-cold conditions give the experiment its name: Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or CDMS. The prefix “Super” indicates an increased sensitivity compared to previous versions of the experiment.

Experiment will measure “fingerprints” left by dark matter
The collisions would also produce pairs of electrons and electron deficiencies that move through the crystals, triggering additional atomic vibrations that amplify the signal from the dark matter collision. The experiment will be able to measure these “fingerprints” left by dark matter with sophisticated superconducting electronics.

Besides Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, two other Department of Energy national labs are involved in the project.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California is managing the construction project. SLAC will provide the experiment’s centerpiece of initially four detector towers, each containing six crystals in the shape of oversized hockey pucks. SLAC built and tested a detector prototype. The first tower could be sent to SNOLAB by the end of 2018.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is working on the experiment’s intricate shielding and cryogenics infrastructure.

“Our experiment will be the world’s most sensitive for relatively light WIMPs,” said Richard Partridge, head of the SuperCDMS group at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, a joint institute of SLAC and Stanford University. “This unparalleled sensitivity will create exciting opportunities to explore new territory in dark matter research.”

Close-knit network of strong partners is crucial to success
Besides SMU, a number of U.S. and Canadian universities also play key roles in the experiment, working on tasks ranging from detector fabrication and testing to data analysis and simulation. The largest international contribution comes from Canada and includes the research infrastructure at SNOLAB.

“We’re fortunate to have a close-knit network of strong collaboration partners, which is crucial for our success,” said Project Director Blas Cabrera from KIPAC. “The same is true for the outstanding support we’re receiving from the funding agencies in the U.S. and Canada.”

Funding is from the DOE Office of Science, $19 million, the National Science Foundation, $12 million, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, $3 million.

SuperCDMS to search for dark matter in entirely new region
“Together we’re now ready to build an experiment that will search for dark matter particles that interact with normal matter in an entirely new region,” said SuperCDMS spokesperson Dan Bauer, Fermilab.

SuperCDMS SNOLAB will be the latest in a series of increasingly sensitive dark matter experiments. The most recent version, located at the Soudan Mine in Minnesota, completed operations in 2015.

”The project has incorporated lessons learned from previous CDMS experiments to significantly improve the experimental infrastructure and detector designs for the experiment,” said SLAC’s Ken Fouts, project manager for SuperCDMS SNOLAB. “The combination of design improvements, the deep location and the infrastructure support provided by SNOLAB will allow the experiment to reach its full potential in the search for low-mass dark matter.” — SLAC National Laboratory; and Margaret Allen, SMU

Tags Dedman College, Jodi Cooley, SMU Department of Physics

Culture, Society & Family Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Events Researcher news SMU In The News Videos

The CW33: Dark Matter Day rocks SMU’s campus

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date November 2, 2017

The CW33 TV visited SMU on Halloween to get a glimpse of International Dark Matter Day in action on the SMU campus.

The CW33 TV stopped at the SMU campus during the early morning hours of Halloween to interview SMU physics professor Jodi Cooley about the capers afoot in celebration of International Dark Matter Day.

The SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences hosted the Oct. 31, 2017 Dark Matter Day celebration for students, faculty, staff and Dallas-area residents.

As part of the festivities, there were speaking events by scientists in the field of dark matter, including dark matter expert Cooley, to explain the elusive particles that scientists refer to as dark matter.

Then throughout Halloween day, the public was invited to test their skills at finding dark matter — in this case, a series of 26 rocks bearing educational messages related to dark matter, which the Society of Physics Students had painted and hidden around the campus. Lucky finders traded them for prizes from the Physics Department.

“In the spirit of science being a pursuit open to all, we are excited to welcome all members of the SMU family to become dark matter hunters for a day,” said Cooley, whose research is focused on the scientific challenge of detecting dark matter. “Explore your campus in the search for dark matter rocks, just as physicists are exploring the cosmos in the hunt for the nature of dark matter itself.”

Watch the full news segment.

EXCERPT:

By Shardae Neal
The CW33
On Halloween (excuse us) “International Dark Matter Day,” SMU students hosted a public witch hunt to search for the unknown: dark matter.

“What we’re doing is hiding 26 rocks that we have with the help of our society of physic students,” explained SMU Physicist Jodi Cooley.

What exactly is dark matter?

“Think about all the stuff there is in the universe,” Cooley added. “What we can account for makes up only four to five percent of the universe. The rest of it is unknown. Turns out 26% of that unknown stuff is dark matter.”

Watch the full news segment.

Tags Dedman College, Jodi Cooley, SMU Department of Physics

Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Events Learning & Education Researcher news Student researchers Videos

SMU Dark Matter Day celebration culminates in a dark matter rock hunt on Halloween

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 23, 2017

“In the spirit of science being a pursuit open to all, we are excited to welcome all members of the SMU family to become dark matter hunters for a day.” — SMU physicist Jodi Cooley

This Halloween, people around the world will be celebrating the mysterious cosmic substance that permeates our universe: dark matter.

At SMU, the Department of Physics in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences is hosting a Dark Matter Day celebration, and students, faculty, staff and DFW residents are invited to join in the educational fun with events open to the public.

To kick off the festivities, two speaking events by scientists in the field of dark matter will familiarize participants with the elusive particles that scientists refer to as dark matter. The first talk is oriented toward the general public, while the second is more technical and will appeal to people familiar with one of the STEM areas of science, technology, engineering or mathematics, particularly physics and astrophysics.

Then throughout Halloween day, everyone is invited to test their skills at finding dark matter — in this case, a series of rocks bearing educational messages related to dark matter, which the Society of Physics Students has painted and then hidden around the campus.

Anyone lucky enough to find one of the 26 rocks can present it at the Physics Department office to receive a prize, says SMU physics professor Jodi Cooley, whose research is focused on the scientific challenge of detecting dark matter.

“In the spirit of science being a pursuit open to all, we are excited to welcome all members of the SMU family to become dark matter hunters for a day,” Cooley said. “Explore your campus in the search for dark matter rocks, just as physicists are exploring the cosmos in the hunt for the nature of dark matter itself.”

Anyone who discovers a dark matter rock on the SMU campus is encouraged to grab their phone and snap a selfie with their rock. Tweet and tag your selfie #SMUDarkMatter so that @SMU, @SMUResearch and @SMUPhysics can retweet photos of the lucky finders.

As SMU’s resident dark matter scientist, Cooley is part of the 100-person international SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment, which uses ultra pure materials and highly sensitive custom-built detectors to listen for the passage of dark matter.

SuperCDMS, an acronym for Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, resides at SNOLAB, an existing underground science laboratory in Ontario, Canada. Located deep underground, SNOLAB allows scientists to use the earth as a shield to block out particles that resemble dark matter, making it easier to see the real thing.

The SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment, expected to be operational in 2020, has been designed to go deeper below the surface of the earth than earlier generations of the research.

“Dark matter experiments have been a smashing success — they’ve progressed farther than anyone anticipated. The SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment is quite unique,” Cooley said. “It will allow us to probe models that predict dark matter with the tiniest masses.”

For more on Cooley’s research, go to “Hunt for dark matter takes physicists deep below earth’s surface, where WIMPS can’t hide.“ — Margaret Allen, SMU

Dark Matter Day events at SMU:

Sunday, Oct. 29, 4 p.m., McCord Auditorium — Maruša Bradač, Associate Professor at the University of California at Davis, will give a public lecture on dark matter. A reception will follow the lecture from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. in the Dallas Hall Rotunda with beverages and light snacks. This event is free and open to the public, and is designed to be open to the widest possible audience.

Monday, Oct. 30, 4 p.m., Fondren Science Building, Room 158 — SMU Associate Professor Jodi Cooley will present a seminar on the SuperCDMS direct-detection dark matter search experiment. This event is part of the Physics Department Speaker Series. While this event is open to the public, it will be a more technical talk and may appeal more to an audience interested in the STEM areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, especially physics and astrophysics.
Tuesday, Oct. 31, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m., SMU Main Campus, Dark Matter Rock Hunt — The SMU Department of Physics has hidden “dark matter rocks” all across the SMU main campus. If you discover one of the dark matter rocks, bring it to the main office of the Physics Department, Fondren Science Building, Room 102, and get a special prize. All SMU students, faculty, staff and community members are welcome to join in the search.

Tags Dedman College, Jodi Cooley, SMU Department of Physics

Culture, Society & Family Energy & Matter Feature Researcher news SMU In The News

APS Physics: Viewpoint — Dark Matter Still at Large

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 12, 2017

“No dark matter particles have been observed by two of the world’s most sensitive direct-detection experiments, casting doubt on a favored dark matter model.” — Jodi Cooley

SMU physicist Jodi Cooley, an associate professor in the Department of Physics, writes in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters about the hunt by physicists worldwide for dark matter — the most elusive and abundant matter in our Universe.

Cooley is an expert in dark matter and a lead researcher on one of the key dark matter experiments in the world.

Cooley’s APS Physics article, “Viewpoint: Dark Matter Still at Large,” published Jan. 11, 2017.

The journal is that of the American Physical Society, a non-profit membership organization advancing knowledge of physics through its research journals, scientific meetings, education, outreach, advocacy and international activities. APS represents more than 53,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world.

Cooley’s current research interest is to improve our understanding of the universe by deciphering the nature of dark matter. The existence of dark matter was first postulated nearly 80 years ago. However, it wasn’t until the last decade that the revolution in precision cosmology revealed conclusively that about a quarter of our universe consisted of dark matter. Cooley and her colleagues operate sophisticated detectors in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota. These detectors can distinguish between elusive dark matter particles and background particles that mimic dark matter interactions.

She received a B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics and Physics from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in 1997. She earned her Masters in 2000 and her Ph.D. in 2003 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her research searching for neutrinos from diffuse astronomical sources with the AMANDA-II detector. Upon graduation she did postdoctoral studies at both MIT and Stanford University.

Cooley is a Principal Investigator on the SuperCDMS dark matter experiment and a Principal Investigator for the AARM collaboration, which aims to develop integrative tools for underground science. She has won numerous awards for her research including an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation and the Ralph E. Powe Jr. Faculty Enhancement Award from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

She was named December 2012 Woman Physicist of the Month by the American Physical Societies Committee on the Status of Women and earned a 2012 HOPE (Honoring our Professor’s Excellence) by SMU. In 2015 she received the Rotunda Outstanding Professor Award.

Read the full article.

EXCERPT:

By Jodi Cooley
Southern Methodist University
Over 80 years ago astronomers and astrophysicists began to inventory the amount of matter in the Universe. In doing so, they stumbled into an incredible discovery: the motion of stars within galaxies, and of galaxies within galaxy clusters, could not be explained by the gravitational tug of visible matter alone [1]. So to rectify the situation, they suggested the presence of a large amount of invisible, or “dark,” matter. We now know that dark matter makes up 84% of the matter in the Universe [2], but its composition—the type of particle or particles it’s made from—remains a mystery. Researchers have pursued a myriad of theoretical candidates, but none of these “suspects” have been apprehended. The lack of detection has helped better define the parameters, such as masses and interaction strengths, that could characterize the particles. For the most compelling dark matter candidate, WIMPs, the viable parameter space has recently become smaller with the announcement in September 2016 by the PandaX-II Collaboration [3] and now by the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Collaboration [4] that a search for the particles has come up empty.

Since physicists don’t know what dark matter is, they need a diverse portfolio of instruments and approaches to detect it. One technique is to try to make dark matter in an accelerator, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and then to look for its decay products with a particle detector. A second technique is to use instruments such as the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to observe dark matter interactions in and beyond our Galaxy. This approach is called “indirect detection” because what the telescope actually observes is the particles produced by a collision between dark matter particles. In the same way that forensic scientists rely on physical evidence to reverse-engineer a crime with no witnesses, scientists use the aftermath of these collisions to reconstruct the identities of the initial dark matter particles.

The third technique, and the one used in both the LUX and PandaX-II experiments, is known as “direct detection.” Here, a detector is constructed on Earth with a massive target to increase the odds of an interaction with the dark matter that exists in our Galaxy. In the case of LUX and PandaX-II, the dark matter particles leave behind traces of light that can be detected with sophisticated sensors. This is akin to having placed cameras at the scene of a crime, capturing the culprit in the act.

Read the full article.

Tags Dedman College, Jodi Cooley, SMU Department of Physics

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SMU 2015 research efforts broadly noted in a variety of ways for world-changing impact

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 8, 2016

SMU scientists and their research have a global reach that is frequently noted, beyond peer publications and media mentions.

By Margaret Allen
SMU News & Communications
It was a good year for SMU faculty and student research efforts. Here is a small sampling of public and published acknowledgements during 2015:

Hot topic merits open access
Taylor & Francis, publisher of the online journal Environmental Education Research, lifted its subscription-only requirement to meet demand for an article on how climate change is taught to middle-schoolers in California.

Co-author of the research was Diego Román, assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.

Román’s research revealed that California textbooks are teaching sixth graders that climate change is a controversial debate stemming from differing opinions, rather than a scientific conclusion based on rigorous scientific evidence.

The article, “Textbooks of doubt: Using systemic functional analysis to explore the framing of climate change in middle-school science textbooks,” published in September. The finding generated such strong interest that Taylor & Francis opened access to the article.

Research makes the cover of Biochemistry
Drugs important in the battle against cancer were tested in a virtual lab by SMU biology professors to see how they would behave in the human cell.

A computer-generated composite image of the simulation made the Dec. 15 cover of the journal Biochemistry.

Scientific articles about discoveries from the simulation were also published in the peer review journals Biochemistry and in Pharmacology Research & Perspectives.

The researchers tested the drugs by simulating their interaction in a computer-generated model of one of the cell’s key molecular pumps — the protein P-glycoprotein, or P-gp. Outcomes of interest were then tested in the Wise-Vogel wet lab.

The ongoing research is the work of biochemists John Wise, associate professor, and Pia Vogel, professor and director of the SMU Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery in Dedman College. Assisting them were a team of SMU graduate and undergraduate students.

The researchers developed the model to overcome the problem of relying on traditional static images for the structure of P-gp. The simulation makes it possible for researchers to dock nearly any drug in the protein and see how it behaves, then test those of interest in an actual lab.

To date, the researchers have run millions of compounds through the pump and have discovered some that are promising for development into pharmaceutical drugs to battle cancer.

Click here to read more about the research.

SMU, Simpson Rowe, sexual assault, video

Strong interest in research on sexual victimization
Teen girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after learning to assertively resist unwanted sexual overtures and after practicing resistance in a realistic virtual environment, according to three professors from the SMU Department of Psychology.

The finding was reported in Behavior Therapy. The article was one of the psychology journal’s most heavily shared and mentioned articles across social media, blogs and news outlets during 2015, the publisher announced.

The study was the work of Dedman College faculty Lorelei Simpson Rowe, associate professor and Psychology Department graduate program co-director; Ernest Jouriles, professor; and Renee McDonald, SMU associate dean for research and academic affairs.

The journal’s publisher, Elsevier, temporarily has lifted its subscription requirement on the article, “Reducing Sexual Victimization Among Adolescent Girls: A Randomized Controlled Pilot Trial of My Voice, My Choice,” and has opened it to free access for three months.

Click here to read more about the research.

Consumers assume bigger price equals better quality
Even when competing firms can credibly disclose the positive attributes of their products to buyers, they may not do so.

Instead, they find it more lucrative to “signal” quality through the prices they charge, typically working on the assumption that shoppers think a high price indicates high quality. The resulting high prices hurt buyers, and may create a case for mandatory disclosure of quality through public policy.

That was a finding of the research of Dedman College’s Santanu Roy, professor, Department of Economics. Roy’s article about the research was published in February in one of the blue-ribbon journals, and the oldest, in the field, The Economic Journal.

Published by the U.K.’s Royal Economic Society, The Economic Journal is one of the founding journals of modern economics. The journal issued a media briefing about the paper, “Competition, Disclosure and Signaling,” typically reserved for academic papers of broad public interest.

Chemistry research group edits special issue
Chemistry professors Dieter Cremer and Elfi Kraka, who lead SMU’s Computational and Theoretical Chemistry Group, were guest editors of a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Physical Chemistry. The issue published in March.

The Computational and Theoretical research group, called CATCO for short, is a union of computational and theoretical chemistry scientists at SMU. Their focus is research in computational chemistry, educating and training graduate and undergraduate students, disseminating and explaining results of their research to the broader public, and programming computers for the calculation of molecules and molecular aggregates.

The special issue of Physical Chemistry included 40 contributions from participants of a four-day conference in Dallas in March 2014 that was hosted by CATCO. The 25th Austin Symposium drew 108 participants from 22 different countries who, combined, presented eight plenary talks, 60 lectures and about 40 posters.

CATCO presented its research with contributions from Cremer and Kraka, as well as Marek Freindorf, research assistant professor; Wenli Zou, visiting professor; Robert Kalescky, post-doctoral fellow; and graduate students Alan Humason, Thomas Sexton, Dani Setlawan and Vytor Oliveira.

There have been more than 75 graduate students and research associates working in the CATCO group, which originally was formed at the University of Cologne, Germany, before moving to SMU in 2009.

Vertebrate paleontology recognized with proclamation
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings proclaimed Oct. 11-17, 2015 Vertebrate Paleontology week in Dallas on behalf of the Dallas City Council.

The proclamation honored the 75th Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, which was jointly hosted by SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in Dedman College and the Perot Museum of Science and Nature. The conference drew to Dallas some 1,200 scientists from around the world.

Making research presentations or presenting research posters were: faculty members Bonnie Jacobs, Louis Jacobs, Michael Polcyn, Neil Tabor and Dale Winkler; adjunct research assistant professor Alisa Winkler; research staff member Kurt Ferguson; post-doctoral researchers T. Scott Myers and Lauren Michael; and graduate students Matthew Clemens, John Graf, Gary Johnson and Kate Andrzejewski.

The host committee co-chairs were Anthony Fiorillo, adjunct research professor; and Louis Jacobs, professor. Committee members included Polcyn; Christopher Strganac, graduate student; Diana Vineyard, research associate; and research professor Dale Winkler.

KERA radio reporter Kat Chow filed a report from the conference, explaining to listeners the science of vertebrate paleontology, which exposes the past, present and future of life on earth by studying fossils of animals that had backbones.

SMU earthquake scientists rock scientific journal

Modelled pressure changes caused by injection and production. (Nature Communications/SMU)

Findings by the SMU earthquake team reverberated across the nation with publication of their scientific article in the prestigious British interdisciplinary journal Nature, ranked as one of the world’s most cited scientific journals.

The article reported that the SMU-led seismology team found that high volumes of wastewater injection combined with saltwater extraction from natural gas wells is the most likely cause of unusually frequent earthquakes occurring in the Dallas-Fort Worth area near the small community of Azle.

The research was the work of Dedman College faculty Matthew Hornbach, associate professor of geophysics; Heather DeShon, associate professor of geophysics; Brian Stump, SMU Albritton Chair in Earth Sciences; Chris Hayward, research staff and director geophysics research program; and Beatrice Magnani, associate professor of geophysics.

The article, “Causal factors for seismicity near Azle, Texas,” published online in late April. Already the article has been downloaded nearly 6,000 times, and heavily shared on both social and conventional media. The article has achieved a ranking of 270, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 144,972 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and 98th percentile of 626 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.

“It has a very high impact factor for an article of its age,” said Robert Gregory, professor and chair, SMU Earth Sciences Department.

The scientific article also was entered into the record for public hearings both at the Texas Railroad Commission and the Texas House Subcommittee on Seismic Activity.

Researchers settle long-debated heritage question of “The Ancient One”

The skull of Kennewick Man and a sculpted bust by StudioEIS based on forensic facial reconstruction by sculptor Amanda Danning. (Credit: Brittany Tatchell)

The research of Dedman College anthropologist and Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory David Meltzer played a role in settling the long-debated and highly controversial heritage of “Kennewick Man.”

Also known as “The Ancient One,” the 8,400-year-old male skeleton discovered in Washington state has been the subject of debate for nearly two decades. Argument over his ancestry has gained him notoriety in high-profile newspaper and magazine articles, as well as making him the subject of intense scholarly study.

Officially the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Kennewick Man was discovered in 1996 and radiocarbon dated to 8500 years ago.

Because of his cranial shape and size he was declared not Native American but instead ‘Caucasoid,’ implying a very different population had once been in the Americas, one that was unrelated to contemporary Native Americans.

But Native Americans long have claimed Kennewick Man as theirs and had asked for repatriation of his remains for burial according to their customs.

Meltzer, collaborating with his geneticist colleague Eske Willerslev and his team at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, in June reported the results of their analysis of the DNA of Kennewick in the prestigious British journal Nature in the scientific paper “The ancestry and affiliations of Kennewick Man.”

The results were announced at a news conference, settling the question based on first-ever DNA evidence: Kennewick Man is Native American.

The announcement garnered national and international media attention, and propelled a new push to return the skeleton to a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced the Bring the Ancient One Home Act of 2015 and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has offered state assistance for returning the remains to Native Tribes.

Science named the Kennewick work one of its nine runners-up in the highly esteemed magazine’s annual “Breakthrough of the Year” competition.

The research article has been viewed more than 60,000 times. It has achieved a ranking of 665, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 169,466 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and in the 94th percentile of 958 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.

In “Kennewick Man: coming to closure,” an article in the December issue of Antiquity, a journal of Cambridge University Press, Meltzer noted that the DNA merely confirmed what the tribes had known all along: “We are him, he is us,” said one tribal spokesman. Meltzer concludes: “We presented the DNA evidence. The tribal members gave it meaning.”

Click here to read more about the research.

Prehistoric vacuum cleaner captures singular award

Paleontologists Louis L. Jacobs, SMU, and Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum, have identified a new species of marine mammal from bones recovered from Unalaska, an Aleutian island in the North Pacific. (Hillsman Jackson, SMU)

Science writer Laura Geggel with Live Science named a new species of extinct marine mammal identified by two SMU paleontologists among “The 10 Strangest Animal Discoveries of 2015.”

The new species, dubbed a prehistoric hoover by London’s Daily Mail online news site, was identified by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, and paleontologist and SMU adjunct research professor Anthony Fiorillo, vice president of research and collections and chief curator at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.

Jacobs and Fiorillo co-authored a study about the identification of new fossils from the oddball creature Desmostylia, discovered in the same waters where the popular “Deadliest Catch” TV show is filmed. The hippo-like creature ate like a vacuum cleaner and is a new genus and species of the only order of marine mammals ever to go extinct — surviving a mere 23 million years.

Desmostylians, every single species combined, lived in an interval between 33 million and 10 million years ago. Their strange columnar teeth and odd style of eating don’t occur in any other animal, Jacobs said.

SMU campus hosted the world’s premier physicists

The SMU Department of Physics hosted the “23rd International Workshop on Deep Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects” from April 27-May 1, 2015. Deep Inelastic Scattering is the process of probing the quantum particles that make up our universe.

As noted by the CERN Courier — the news magazine of the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, which hosts the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest science experiment — more than 250 scientists from 30 countries presented more than 200 talks on a multitude of subjects relevant to experimental and theoretical research. SMU physicists presented at the conference.

The SMU organizing committee was led by Fred Olness, professor and chair of the SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College, who also gave opening and closing remarks at the conference. The committee consisted of other SMU faculty, including Jodi Cooley, associate professor; Simon Dalley, senior lecturer; Robert Kehoe, professor; Pavel Nadolsky, associate professor, who also presented progress on experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider; Randy Scalise, senior lecturer; and Stephen Sekula, associate professor.

Sekula also organized a series of short talks for the public about physics and the big questions that face us as we try to understand our universe.

Click here to read more about the research.

Tags Alan Humason, Alisa J. WInkler, Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development, Anthony Fiorillo, Beatrice Magnani, Bonnie F. Jacobs, Brian W. Stump, Chris Hayward, Christopher Strganac, Dale A. Winkler, Dani Setlawan, David Meltzer, Dedman College, Diana Vineyard, Diego Román, Dieter Creme, Elfi Kraka, Ernest Jouriles, Fredrick Olness, Gary Johnson, Heather R. DeShon, Jodi Cooley, John F. Graf, John Wise, Kate Andrzejewski, Kurt Ferguson, Lauren Michael, Lorelei Simpson Rowe, Louis L. Jacobs, Marek Freindorf, Matthew Clemens, Matthew J. Hornbach, Michael J. Polcyn, Neil Tabor, Pavel Nadolsky, Pia Vogel, Randy Scalise, Renee McDonald, Robert Gregory, Robert Kalescky, Robert Kehoe, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Santanu Roy, Simon Dalley, SMU Department of Anthropology, SMU Department of Biological Sciences, SMU Department of Chemistry, SMU Department of Economics, SMU Department of Physics, SMU Department of Psychology, Stephen J. Sekula, Thomas Sexton, Timothy S. Myers, Vytor Oliveira, Wenli Zou

Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Researcher news SMU In The News

National Public Radio’s Science Friday: Understanding the dark side of physics

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 30, 2015

Understanding what makes up dark matter and dark energy could help answer some of the biggest questions in physics

SMU physicist Jodi Cooley appears in studio while a guest on NPR's Science Friday radio program to talk about dark matter with host Ira Flatow. (SMU: Nancy George) — SMU physicist Jodi Cooley appears in studio while a guest on NPR’s Science Friday radio program to talk about dark matter with host Ira Flatow. (SMU: Nancy George)

SMU physicist Jodi Cooley was a guest of Ira Flatow on National Public Radio’s Science Friday show to share in a discussion about what physicists know and don’t know about mysterious dark matter.

Dark matter is believed to make up the bulk of the matter in the universe.

Cooley, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Physics, is an experimental particle physicist and part of a scientific team searching for dark matter. She’s a member of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment.

SuperCDMS, as the experiment is called, is currently located deep in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in an abandoned mine in a national park in Minnesota.

SuperCDMS is a collaboration of 18 institutions from the U.S., Canada, and Spain.

“We go deep under the earth to shield ourselves from cosmic-ray radiation so that we can use our detector technology to ‘listen’ for the passage of dark matter through the earth,” says Cooley. “Dark matter is currently believed to be a non-luminous form of matter which makes up 85 percent of the matter in the universe.”

The next-generation of SuperCDMS is slated for construction at SNOLAB, an underground laboratory in Ontario, Canada. With SuperCDMS SNOLAB, physicists will go deeper below the surface of the earth than earlier generations of the experiment. The scientists use the earth as a shield to block out particles that resemble dark matter, making it easier to see the real thing.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope discovered a ghostly ring of dark matter that formed long ago during a titanic collision between two massive galaxy clusters. The ring's discovery is among the strongest evidence yet that dark matter exists. (NASA) — Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope discovered a ghostly ring of dark matter that formed long ago during a titanic collision between two massive galaxy clusters. The ring’s discovery is among the strongest evidence yet that dark matter exists. (NASA)

The NPR Science Friday show aired March 27, 2015.

Listen to the show.

EXCERPT:

Ira Flatow, host
Becky Fogel, producer
Science Friday
Neutrons, protons, and electrons—these are the basic building blocks of matter. But this kind of matter is only a tiny fraction of the entire universe. The rest, about 95 percent, in fact, is divided between dark matter and dark energy.

Understanding what makes up dark matter and dark energy could help answer some of the biggest questions in physics.

Physicists Jodi Cooley, Dan Hooper and Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg join Ira Flatow to discuss what we do and don’t know about this “darker” side of physics, and what we hope to learn.

FLATOW: As an experimentalist, can you perform any experiments to see what dark matter is made out of?

COOLEY: As a matter of fact we can, and there are different types of experiments that we can perform. The types of experiments that we perform fall into three different categories. Steven had already talked about the first kind, where you’re looking at dark matter particles interacting with other dark matter particles in the article that appeared yesterday.

The other way that you can look for dark matter particles is, dark matter is thought to be in the galaxy all around us, so by building experiments here on earth, we can wait and try to detect the dark matter interacting with the experiments here on earth. That’s the dark matter detection I work on. The third way you could do it is at a collider at the Large Hadron Collider, collide together ordinary matter and look for dark matter coming out.

FLATOW: Is that contemplated? They are tweaking it to come back online. Is that something they are looking for?

COOLEY: I do believe they are. They have a working group at the Large Hadron Collider, both the ATLAS and the CDMS collaborations, both have working groups with people who are looking for a missing energy signature that could be a hint of a dark matter signal.

Listen to the show.

Follow SMUResearch.com on twitter at @smuresearch.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Dedman College, Jodi Cooley, SMU Department of Physics

Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Videos

Hunt for dark matter takes physicists deep below earth’s surface, where WIMPS can’t hide

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date August 6, 2014

The next-generation of the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, called SuperCDMS, is slated for construction at SNOLAB, an underground laboratory in Ontario, Canada

Dark matter makes up much of the universe, and surrounds us all like an invisible soup. Physicists have hunted dark matter particles for decades, but they continue to elude observation.

Now a major international experiment aimed at discovering dark matter could be constructed and operational by 2018, according to the consortium of scientists on the experiment known by its acronym, SuperCDMS SNOLAB.

With SuperCDMS SNOLAB, physicists will go deeper below the surface of the earth than earlier generations of the experiment. Deep underground, scientists use the earth as a shield to block out particles that resemble dark matter, making it easier to see the real thing.

Physicists have begun research and design and are building prototypes for the next-generation SuperCDMS, known by its full name as the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. It will be located at SNOLAB, an existing underground science laboratory in Ontario, Canada, said physicist Jodi Cooley, a SuperCDMS scientist.

As an experimental particle physicist, Cooley heads the dark matter project team at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and is a designated principal investigator, or lead scientist, on the SuperCDMS experiments.

Research and design of SuperCDMS SNOLAB is slated to continue through 2015, with fabrication in 2016 and 2017. The experiment could be ready for operational testing by 2018, Cooley said.

DOE and NSF announce support for SuperCDMS SNOLAB
The U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation recently announced they will fund SuperCDMS SNOLAB — as well as two other unrelated dark matter experiments — as part of a committed U.S. scientific focus on furthering investigation into elusive dark matter. The agencies previously funded the predecessors to SuperCDMS SNOLAB, known as SuperCDMS Soudan and CDMS.

“This is a very exciting time in our field, and I think the United States is well-positioned to play a key role,” said Cooley, an associate professor in SMU’s Department of Physics. “The three experiments chosen, SuperCDMS, LZ and AMDX, are complementary and together provide sensitivity to a large variety of potential dark matter candidates. In particular, SuperCDMS provides unprecedented sensitivity to light dark-matter candidates.”

SuperCDMS SNOLAB is a collaboration of physicists from 21 institutions in the United States, Canada and Europe.

Dark matter — the next unsolved mystery, and a key to the Universe
There has long been evidence that dark matter exists and is a large part of the matter that makes up the Universe. A handful of experiments around the globe, including SuperCDMS Soudan and CDMS II, use different methods to focus on the hunt for dark matter.

The design of SuperCDMS SNOLAB, which is among the world’s leading dark matter projects, enables it to look for WIMPS, short for weakly interacting massive particles.

WIMPS are a generic class of dark matter, with an unknown mass that could be either “light” or “heavy.” SuperCDMS has unprecedented sensitivity to the light mass, sometimes called low mass, WIMPS. The LZ experiment will have unprecedented sensitivity to heavy mass, or high mass, WIMPS. AMDX looks for a different type of dark matter called an axion.

CDMS and SuperCDMS Soudan also focus on lower mass dark matter.

Deep below the ground, to block out distractions
SuperCDMS SNOLAB will be constructed 6,800 feet underground — much deeper than CDMS or SuperCDMS Soudan, which are 2,341 feet below the earth in an abandoned underground iron mine near Soudan, Minn. Depth decreases what Cooley refers to as the “background noise” of other particles that can mimic dark matter or cloud an observation.

DOE and NSF announced they would fund dark matter experiments in the wake of recommendations in May from their Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, a task force of the DOE and NSF made up of U.S. physicists.

In its report, the panel didn’t specify any particular dark matter experiments for funding, but broadly concluded that investment in the search for dark matter is key for the United States to maintain its status as a global leader in addressing the most pressing scientific questions.

Total projected cost for SuperCDMS SNOLAB is about $30 million.

SuperCDMS: How it works
The heart of SuperCDMS is an array of 42 detectors the size of hockey pucks, stacked atop one another in a copper canister encased in a large cooling tower. Their purpose is to capture any evidence of dark matter with their silicon and germanium surfaces, which are cooled to near absolute zero to measure single particle interactions.

SuperCDMS SNOLAB is a ramped-up version of its predecessors, with 10 times the sensitivity to detect a full range of WIMPS, from 1 to 1,000 gigaelectronvolts.

SMU’s SuperCDMS project team is participating in the design and development of the shielding at SuperCDMS SNOLAB and the selection of radio-pure materials that will be used in the construction of the experiment. The shielding’s purpose is to shield the detectors from background particles — the interaction signatures of neutrons — that can mimic the behavior of WIMPS. Jodi Cooley explains the SMU team’s search for ultra-pure construction materials for the detectors.

SMU’s dark matter research is funded through a $1 million Early Career Development Award that Cooley was awarded in 2012 from the National Science Foundation.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and SLAC National Laboratory are the lead laboratories on SuperCDMS Soudan and contribute scientific staff, project management, and engineering and design staff.

Besides SMU and Fermilab, institutions with scientists on SuperCDMS include the California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Queen’s University, Texas A&M University, University of California-Berkeley, University of Florida, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique-LPN, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Santa Clara University, Stanford University, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, University of Colorado, University of Minnesota, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, SLAC/Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Syracuse University, University of British Columbia, University of Evansville and the University of South Dakota. — Margaret Allen

Tags Dedman College, Jodi Cooley, SMU Department of Physics

Energy & Matter Researcher news

Search for dark matter covers new ground with CDMS experiment in Minnesota

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date February 28, 2014

Scientists report the Cryogenic Dark Matter Experiment has set more stringent limits on light dark matter

Scientists hunting for dark matter announced Friday they’ve now been able to probe the dark matter mass and cross section in a region that no other experiment has been able to explore.

Dark matter has never been detected, but scientists believe it constitutes a large part of our universe. Key to finding dark matter is determining its mass, or the volume of matter it contains.

On Friday, scientists with CDMS, a dark matter experiment that operates a particle detector in an abandoned underground mine in northern Minnesota, said they’ve narrowed the possibilities for dark matter’s mass.

The CDMS experiment searches for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which some physicists theorize constitutes dark matter. WIMPS are particles of such low mass that they rarely interact with ordinary matter, making them extremely difficult to detect, said physicist Jodi Cooley, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and a member of the experiment.

CDMS scientists say they’ve narrowed the range of measurements in which dark matter’s mass might occur.

“This new result is sensitive to WIMPs of lower mass than previous experiments have been able to attempt to measure,” Cooley said.

The result, however, conflicts with results from another experiment that is also hunting for dark matter. A handful of experiments around the world are using different techniques to solve the question.

“It’s not enough for one technique and one experiment to say they’ve made a discovery. It always has to be verified and looked at by another experiment, independently, with a different technique,” Cooley said. “If different techniques and different instruments prove the finding, then you can have a lot more confidence in the result.”

SMU graduate student Bedile Kara worked on the CDMS analysis. Kara performed the data processing and developed data quality and particle identification criteria used for the result.

Dark matter makes up the bulk of the universe, but know one has seen it
Scientists looking for dark matter face a serious challenge: No one knows what dark matter particles look like. So their search covers a wide range of possible traits — different masses, different probabilities of interacting with regular matter.

Scientists on the CDMS, which stands for Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, announced they have shifted the border of the search down to a dark-matter particle mass and rate of interaction that has never been probed.

“We’re pushing CDMS to as low mass as we can,” says physicist Dan Bauer, the project manager for CDMS at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory near Chicago. “We’re proving the particle detector technology here.”

The CDMS result does not claim any hints of dark matter particles. But it contradicts a result announced in January by another dark matter experiment, CoGeNT, which uses particle detectors made of germanium, the same detector material used by CDMS.

To search for dark matter, CDMS scientists cool their detectors to very low temperatures to detect the very small energies deposited by the collisions of dark matter particles with the germanium. They operate their detectors half a mile underground in an abandoned iron ore mine in northern Minnesota. The mine provides shielding from cosmic rays that could clutter the detector as it waits for passing dark matter particles.

Dark matter experiments attempt to understand dark matter despite background noise
Friday’s result carves out interesting new dark matter territory for masses below six GeV, a unit of energy for measuring subatomic particles. The dark matter experiment Large Underground Xenon, or LUX, recently ruled out a wide range of masses and interaction rates above that with the announcement of its first result in October 2013.

Scientists have expressed an increasing amount of interest of late in the search for low-mass dark matter particles, with CDMS and three other experiments — DAMA, CoGeNT and CRESST — all finding their data compatible with the existence of dark matter particles between five and 20 GeV. But such light dark-matter particles are hard to pin down. The lower the mass of the dark-matter particles, the less energy they leave in detectors, and the more likely it is that background noise will drown out any signals.

Even more confounding is the fact that scientists don’t know whether dark matter particles interact in the same way in detectors built with different materials to search for dark matter in more than a dozen experiments around the world.

“It’s important to look in as many materials as possible to try to understand whether dark matter interacts in this more complicated way,” says Adam Anderson, a graduate student at MIT who worked on the latest CDMS analysis as part of his thesis. “Some materials might have very weak interactions. If you only picked one, you might miss it.”

Scientists around the world seem to be taking that advice, building different types of detectors and constantly improving their methods.

“Progress is extremely fast,” Anderson says. “The sensitivity of these experiments is increasing by an order of magnitude every few years.”

Elusive dark matter — the “glue” that represents 85 percent of the matter in our universe — has never been observed. Cooley in 2012 was recognized by the National Science Foundation with its prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award. The NSF awarded Cooley a 5-year, $1 million research grant toward her CDMS dark matter research. — Margaret Allen, SMU, and Kathryn Jepsen, Fermilab

Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Bedile Kara, Dedman College, Jodi Cooley, SMU Department of Physics

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Dark matter search may turn up evidence of WIMPS: SMU Researcher Q&A

Post author By Margaret Allen

Post date April 3, 2012

Radioactivity interferes with our ability to observe dark matter. A banana would be more radioactive than the materials we use for our experiment. — Jodi Cooley

The XIA Alpha Particle Counter sounds like it belongs in a science fiction movie. In reality it’s housed in a clean room operated by SMU’s Department of Physics, where SMU physicist Jodi Cooley and her students rely on it as part of their search for dark matter.

Cooley is a member of the global scientific consortium called SuperCryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS). SuperCDMS is searching for elusive dark matter — the “glue” that represents 85 percent of the matter in our universe but which has never been observed.

SuperCDMS operates a particle detector in an underground abandoned mine in Minnesota. The detector is designed to capture a glimpse of WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), which some physicists theorize constitutes dark matter. WIMPS are particles of such low mass that they rarely interact with ordinary matter, making them extremely difficult to detect.

Now SuperCDMS plans to build a larger and even more sensitive detector for deployment at SnoLab, an even deeper underground mine near Ontario, Canada. To prepare, Cooley’s team will advance analysis techniques and help determine ultra pure construction materials to increase the detector’s sensitivity to dark matter interactions.

In testing materials, Cooley’s team measures how much radon or radioactivity occurs as background interference on a sample. SuperCDMS scientists try to minimize background interference to improve the chances of observing WIMPS.

To assess background, Cooley and her team rely on the high-tech XIA Alpha Particle Counter. SMU is one of only five entities in the world to house the XIA.

An assistant professor in the SMU Department of Physics, Cooley was recently recognized by the National Science Foundation with its prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Award. The NSF awarded Cooley a 5-year, $1 million research grant toward her SuperCDMS dark matter research. Students assisting in the XIA counting include Bedile Karabuga, doctoral student, and Mayisha Nakib, first year.

What’s the importance of background?
Cooley: For people who are older, they’ll remember back before digital TVs to analog TVs. Sometimes you’d turn to a channel and it would be fuzzy, so you’d play with the antenna, play with the contrast. That’s sort of the same thing going on in our detectors.

We want our detectors to produce a clear image of dark matter. But we have a lot of background or static and fuzz getting in the way. So we have a bag of tricks for removing that static or fuzz to help us see if the dark matter interacts in our detectors.

Just like the TV, we don’t want to start with a channel that’s completely snow, but a channel that’s sort of coming in. You want to reduce the background as much as possible. That’s what we’re doing with SuperCDMS. So the studies we’re doing are trying to reduce the background around the instrument by selecting ultra pure material with which to construct the instrument.

The background is from radioactivity, cosmic rays, and just from the fact there are particles around us all the time. So we try to minimize them as much as possible. Even our finger essentially would introduce radioactivity onto our detectors.

How important are ultra pure materials?
Cooley: This is very critical. We’re looking for a very rare occurrence: dark matter interacting in these detectors. Radioactivity interferes with our ability to observe dark matter. The radioactivity in most materials is much higher than the rate of dark matter interactions. So we try to get the purest materials we can find. To describe how pure a material we’re seeking, it helps to know that a banana would be more radioactive. Touching the detectors with our fingers, because our fingers have potassium on them, would ruin the experiment. We’re looking for very trace levels of radioactivity in materials.

To select the best, we try to count the rate of radioactive decays in materials. Our SuperCDMS collaboration has several types of counters, and different ways and techniques to calculate a material’s radioactivity. Here at SMU in the LUMINA Lab — Laboratory for Ultra Pure Material Isotope and Neutron Assessment — we have the XIA counter, which we’ve named Peruna.

Where do neutrons enter the picture?
Cooley: Neutrons are nearly impossible to distinguish from dark matter in our detectors. They also form background. My postdoctoral researcher Silvia Scorza and SMU graduate student Hang Qiu are both characterizing neutrons that come from the materials. That’s primarily done through simulations. So once we have rates of these types of interactions, we can generate through simulations what this would mean for the experiment. That helps us determine the right materials.

How does the XIA work?
Cooley: The instrument is essentially a drift chamber. We put a material sample on the surface of a tray in the chamber. An electric field goes through the instrument. When the charged particles give off radioactivity in the electric field they drift upward, and then we can measure the energy of the particles and the number of them from any given sample.

Can that be challenging?
Cooley: It’s not trivial. There are subtleties in the instrument. In trying to understand the data and trying to get an accurate count off certain types of materials such as plastics, we have to decide on certain conditions, like how long should the purging process last.

Why is there more than one dark matter experiment in the world?
Cooley: Dark matter is an important question and there are a variety of experiments using different techniques to solve the question. It’s not enough for one technique and one experiment to say they’ve made a discovery. It always has to be verified and looked at by another experiment, independently, with a different technique. If different techniques and different instruments prove the finding, then you can have a lot more confidence in the result. — Margaret Allen

Tags Dedman College, Jodi Cooley, SMU Department of Physics

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The Shorthorn: SMU’s Jodi Cooley sheds light on dark matter

Post author By Margaret Allen

Post date January 19, 2012

Book a live interview

To book a live or taped interview with Jodi Cooley in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

Related links

Jodi Cooley
SMU CDMS home page
Fermilab: Dark matter and supersymmetry FAQ
CERN: Recipe for a Universe
SMU Department of Physics
Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences

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Science students at the University of Texas at Arlington gathered Wednesday for a talk by SMU physicist Jodi Cooley about her work as part of a scientific team searching for dark matter. Cooley, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Physics, is an experimental particle physicist and is part of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. Her talk at the university was covered by The Shorthorn, the university’s newspaper.

Read the full story.

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By Russell Kirby
The Shorthorn Staff
Jodi Cooley, physics assistant professor from Southern Methodist University, spoke about the way her team of researchers is attempting to detect dark matter to an audience of about 30 students and faculty.

Physics assistant professor Chris Jackson, who invited Cooley to speak, said her eight years of involvement with the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search and time as a spokeswoman for the search experiments makes her an expert on the subject.

“I like to solve interesting problems,” Cooley said. “To me, one of the most interesting puzzles is that 85 percent of matter in the universe is missing. We’re trying to figure it out, but it’s a hard problem.”

Cooley presented analysis from data released last spring and explained the variety of potential improvements that would contribute to the development of this data and ultimately the detection of dark matter. The overall hype of the subject inspired questions from professors.

Among them was a question from physics professor Zdzislaw Musielak, who asked how the accuracy of Cooley’s graphs improved over time. Cooley said the testing equipment became more accurate and thus the results were more accurate.

Read the full story.

SMU has an uplink facility on campus for live TV, radio or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or to book them in the SMU studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650 or UT Dallas Office of Media Relations at 972-883-4321.

Tags Dedman College, Jodi Cooley, SMU Department of Physics

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Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Researcher news SMU In The News Technology

Science News: Hints of dark matter reported, again

Post author By Margaret Allen

Post date September 16, 2011

Book a live interview

To book a live or taped interview with Jodi Cooley in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

Related links

Jodi Cooley
SMU CDMS home page
Fermilab: Dark matter and supersymmetry FAQ
CERN: Recipe for a Universe
SMU Department of Physics
Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences

More SMU Research news

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Out-of-the-blue panic attacks aren’t without warning

New Texas Native: 96-million-year-old croc alters origins from Europe to North America

Physical activity a buffer for those at-risk for panic attacks

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Science News quotes SMU physicist Dr. Jodi Cooley in its Sept. 12 report “Hints of dark matter reported, again.”

The online story notes that two of the world’s particle detectors differ on whether dark matter has been spotted. Science journalist Devin Powell asked Cooley, assistant professor of experimental particle physics in SMU’s Physics Department, to weigh in on the matter.

Cooley is part of the international collaboration of scientists that is hunting for dark matter on the CDMS II experiment in Minnesota’s Soudan mine.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Devin Powell
Science News
In the war of the WIMPs, a new combatant has joined the fray. The CRESST-II experiment has seen hints of the weakly interacting massive particles, a leading candidate for the hidden dark matter thought to account for most of the universe’s matter.

The new results, reported September 6 at the International Conference on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics in Munich, add controversy to an already contentious field that is divided into two camps: those that have seen signs of the particles and those that haven’t.

“It’s another small victory for those arguing that this is dark matter, but it’s not going to decisively determine anything,” says theorist Dan Hooper of the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. “We still haven’t seen a smoking gun.”

…

To further complicate the picture, though, these two experiments must be reconciled with results from the DAMA/LIBRA experiment. Its sodium iodide detector in Gran Sasso has found evidence for WIMPs that suggests slightly different properties for the particles than what’s been hinted at in the more recent work.

“I don’t think we know for sure exactly what is going on,” says Jodi Cooley, a particle physicist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “Based on the understanding we have of dark matter and how it behaves, I’m not sure how much agreement I would say that these experiments have.”

Cooley works on the CDMS II experiment in Minnesota’s Soudan mine, one of two detectors that have seen no signs of dark matter or its purported particles at all. XENON100, which searches for dark matter using a tank of noble gas in Gran Sasso, has ruled out all of the WIMPs proposed by CRESST-II and its compatriots.

Read the full story.

Cooley also was quoted in a story by Physicsworld.com, “CRESST uncovers hint of dark matter,” published online Sept. 8.

EXCERPT:

… The question is whether the signal from CRESST, which points to a relatively light WIMP, can be reconciled with results from other direct-detection experiments. DAMA and CoGeNT have both recorded positive signals, but not for WIMPs with the same range of properties. Worse, the CRESST signal suggests a WIMP with properties that had previously been ruled-out by experiments such as XENON and CDMS, the latter of which is based at the Soudan mine.

“It is clear that it is difficult to reconcile the results from CDMS, XENON, CRESST and other dark-matter experiments with a single, simple dark-matter interpretation,” says Jodi Cooley, a physicist at the Southern Methodist University in Texas, US, who works on the CDMS experiment. “So, that leaves one of two possibilities. Either dark matter is behaving in a very strange way that we do not understand, or the backgrounds in the CRESST experiment are not well enough understood. To me, these results underline the need to have experiments that are capable of operating a mode where background subtraction is not necessary.”

Not everyone agrees. The properties of a detected WIMP are estimates, liable to change with varying assumptions about the equipment used. This leads some physicists to believe that the positive results can be reconciled.

Read the full story.

Tags Dedman College, Jodi Cooley, SMU Department of Physics

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2010 a year of advances for SMU scientific researchers at the vanguard of those helping civilization

Post author By Margaret Allen

Post date December 21, 2010

Book a live interview

To book a live or taped interview with an SMU scientist in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

More SMU Research news

A new breathing therapy reduces panic and anxiety by reversing hyperventilation

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Veterinary medicine shifts to more women, fewer men; pattern will repeat in medicine, law fields

No evidence for ancient comet causing Clovis catastrophe, archaeologists say

Taking a new look at old digs: Trampling animals can alter muddy Paleolithic sites

DOD, industry fund $5.6 million SMU-led research for hi-tech prosthetics

Italy honors supervolcano fossil discovery; Capellini Medal to SMU’s James Quick

Snail mail beats phones to help feds sustain ample fish stocks in U.S. coastal waters

Africa’s cell phone boom can’t trump dire need for schools, roads, power, water

Research could change course of treatment for cancer that spreads to bones

Abusive mothers improve parenting with home visits, classes, emotional help

Mental health care needs of abused Mexican women immigrants slated for study

Federal school lunches linked to childhood obesity

Mad? Sad? Glad? Help for people with severe mental illness who can’t “read” feelings

From picking apart atomic particles at Switzerland’s CERN, to unraveling the mysterious past, to delving into the human psyche, SMU researchers are in the vanguard of those helping civilization understand more and live better.

With both public and private funding — and the assistance of their students — they are tackling such scientific and social problems as brain diseases, immigration, diabetes, evolution, volcanoes, panic disorders, childhood obesity, cancer, radiation, nuclear test monitoring, dark matter, the effects of drilling in the Barnett Shale, and the architecture of the universe.

The sun never sets on SMU research
Besides working in campus labs and within the Dallas-area community, SMU scientists conduct research throughout the world, including at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and in Angola, the Canary Islands, Mongolia, Kenya, Italy, China, the Congo Basin, Ethiopia, Mexico, the Northern Mariana Islands and South Korea.

“Research at SMU is exciting and expanding,” says Associate Vice President for Research and Dean of Graduate Studies James E. Quick, a professor in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences. “Our projects cover a wide range of problems in basic and applied research, from the search for the Higgs particle at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN to the search for new approaches to treat serious diseases. The University looks forward to creating increasing opportunities for undergraduates to become involved as research expands at SMU.”

Funding from public and private sources
In 2009-10, SMU received $25.6 million in external funding for research, up from $16.5 million the previous year.

“Research is a business that cannot be grown without investment,” Quick says. “Funding that builds the research enterprise is an investment that will go on giving by enabling the University to attract more federal grants in future years.”

The funding came from public and private sources, including the National Science Foundation; the National Institutes of Health; the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education and Energy; the U.S. Geological Survey; Google.org; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; Texas’ own Hogg Foundation for Mental Health; and the Texas Instruments Foundation.

Worldwide, the news media are covering SMU research. See some of the coverage. Browse a sample of the research:

CERN and the origin of our universe
Led by Physics Professor Ryszard Stroynowski, SMU physics researchers belong to the global consortium of scientists investigating the origins of our universe by monitoring high-speed sub-atomic particle collisions at CERN, the world’s largest physics experiment.

Compounds to fight neurodegenerative diseases

Synthetic organic chemist and Chemistry Professor Edward Biehl leads a team developing organic compounds for possible treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s. Preliminary investigation of one compound found it was extremely potent as a strong, nontoxic neuroprotector in mice.

Hunting dark matter
Assistant Professor of Physics Jodi Cooley belongs to a high-profile international team of experimental particle physicists searching for elusive dark matter — believed to constitute the bulk of the matter in the universe — at an abandoned underground mine in Minnesota, and soon at an even deeper mine in Canada.

Robotic arms for injured war vets

Electrical Engineering Chairman and Professor Marc Christensen is director of a new $5.6 million center funded by the Department of Defense and industry. The center will develop for war veteran amputees a high-tech robotic arm with fiber-optic connectivity to the brain capable of “feeling” sensations.

Green energy from the Earth’s inner heat

The SMU Geothermal Laboratory, under Earth Sciences Professor David Blackwell, has identified and mapped U.S. geothermal resources capable of supplying a green source of commercial power generation, including resources that were much larger than expected under coal-rich West Virginia.

Exercise can be magic drug for depression and anxiety

Psychologist Jasper Smits, director of the Anxiety Research and Treatment Program at SMU, says exercise can help many people with depression and anxiety disorders and should be more widely prescribed by mental health care providers.

The traditional treatments of cognitive behavioral therapy and pharmacotherapy don’t reach everyone who needs them, says Smits, an associate professor of psychology.

Virtual reality “dates” to prevent victimization

SMU psychologists Ernest Jouriles, Renee McDonald and Lorelei Simpson have partnered with SMU Guildhall in developing an interactive video gaming environment where women on virtual-reality dates can learn and practice assertiveness skills to prevent sexual victimization.

With assertive resistance training, young women have reduced how often they are sexually victimized, the psychologists say.

Controlled drug delivery agents for diabetes
Associate Chemistry Professor Brent Sumerlin leads a team of SMU chemistry researchers — including postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate students — who fuse the fields of polymer, organic and biochemistries to develop novel materials with composite properties. Their research includes developing nano-scale polymer particles to deliver insulin to diabetics.

Sumerlin, associate professor of chemistry, was named a 2010-2012 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, which carries a $50,000 national award to support his research.

Human speed
An expert on the locomotion of humans and other terrestrial animals, Associate Professor of Applied Physiology and Biomechanics Peter Weyand has analyzed the biomechanics of world-class athletes Usain Bolt and Oscar Pistorius. His research targets the relationships between muscle function, metabolic energy expenditure, whole body mechanics and performance.

Weyand’s research also looks at why smaller people tire faster. Finding that they have to take more steps to cover the same distance or travel at the same speed, he and other scientists derived an equation that can be used to calculate the energetic cost of walking.

Pacific Ring of Fire volcano monitoring
An SMU team of earth scientists led by Professor and Research Dean James Quick works with the U.S. Geological Survey to monitor volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire near Guam on the Northern Mariana Islands. Their research will help predict and anticipate hazards to the islands, the U.S. military and commercial jets.

The two-year, $250,000 project will use infrasound — in addition to more conventional seismic monitoring — to “listen” for signs a volcano is about to blow.

Reducing anxiety and asthma
A system of monitoring breathing to reduce CO2 intake is proving useful for reducing the pain of chronic asthma and panic disorder in separate studies by Associate Psychology Professor Thomas Ritz and Assistant Psychology Professor Alicia Meuret.

The two have developed the four-week program to teach asthmatics and those with panic disorder how to better control their condition by changing the way they breathe.

Breast Cancer community engagement
Assistant Psychology Professor Georita Friersen is working with African-American and Hispanic women in Dallas to address the quality-of-life issues they face surrounding health care, particularly during diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer.

Friersen also examines health disparities regarding prevention and treatment of chronic diseases among medically underserved women and men.

Paleoclimate in humans’ first environment
Paleobotanist and Associate Earth Sciences Professor Bonnie Jacobs researches ancient Africa’s vegetation to better understand the environmental and ecological context in which our ancient human ancestors and other mammals evolved.

Jacobs is part of an international team of researchers who combine independent lines of evidence from various fossil and geochemical sources to reconstruct the prehistoric climate, landscape and ecosystems of Ethiopia in particular. She also identifies and prepares flora fossil discoveries for Ethiopia’s national museum.

Ice Age humans

Anthropology Professor David Meltzer explores the western Rockies of Colorado to understand the prehistoric Folsom hunters who adapted to high-elevation environments during the Ice Age.

Meltzer, a world-recognized expert on paleoIndians and early human migration from eastern continents to North America, was inducted into the National Academy of Scientists in 2009.

Understanding evolution
The research of paleontologist Alisa WInkler focuses on the systematics, paleobiogeography and paleoecology of fossil mammals, in particular rodents and rabbits.

Her study of prehistoric rodents in East Africa and Texas, such as the portion of jaw fossil pictured, is helping shed more light on human evolution.

Tags Alicia Meuret, Alisa J. WInkler, Bonnie F. Jacobs, Brent Sumerlin, David Blackwell, David Meltzer, Edward Biehl, Ernest Jouriles, Georita Friersen, James E. Quick, Jasper Smits, Jodi Cooley, Lorelei Simpson, Lorelei Simpson Rowe, Marc Christensen, Peter Weyand, Renee McDonald, Ryszard Stroynowski, Thomas Ritz

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Energy & Matter Researcher news Slideshows SMU In The News Technology Videos

ABC 8: Minnesota mine could yield secrets of the universe to SMU professor

Post author By Margaret Allen

Post date November 29, 2010

The search for mysterious dark matter at an abandoned mine in Minnesota is the subject of “Minnesota mine could yield secrets of the universe to SMU professor,” which first aired Nov. 24 on WFAA Channel 8 in Dallas.

WFAA reporter Jonathan Betz interviewed SMU scientist Jodi Cooley, an assistant professor of experimental particle physics in the SMU Physics Department.

Cooley is a member of the collaboration on the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS II) experiment.

The experiment is located deep in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in the abandoned Soudan Underground Mine in a national park in Minnesota.

Cooley was part of a scientific group of experimental particle physicists who earlier reported in the journal Science that they couldn’t rule out that they may have seen a glimpse of dark matter.

Watch WFAA’s coverage

Book a live interview

To book a live or taped interview with Jodi Cooley in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

Related links

Jodi Cooley
Video: Jodi Cooley at SLAC
CDMS: Lay explanation of the research findings
SMU CDMS home page
Symmetry Magazine: Dark Matter Experiment Results Announced
Fermilab: Dark matter and supersymmetry FAQ
CERN: Recipe for a Universe
SMU Department of Physics
Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences

Physicists have been searching for dark matter — the substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe — for decades.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Jonathan Betz
WFAA
SOUDAN, Minnesota — It’s invisible, but people still look for it.
It’s cosmic, but confusing.

We’re talking about “dark matter.” Find it, and it’s worth millions.

For SMU physicists that — and curiosity — make it worth the search.

SMU professor Jodi Cooley tries to teach how the universe works. Still, it’s a subject even she doesn’t fully understand.

“I’ve always been attracted to things that are hard or difficult,” she said. “If people say, ‘It can’t be done,’ I’ve always said, ‘Really? Are you sure? I’m going to go do it!'”

It’s a drive that sends her to extremes.

Twice a year, Professor Cooley embarks on a journey that she hopes will take her to the farthest reaches of the universe.

That quest is by way of Soudan, Minnesota — a four-hour drive north of Minneapolis. It’s a place where the skies open to land untouched by developers, and tiny towns forged a century ago by people working underground.

It’s those old iron mines that now draw the country’s top minds to this remote location.

“We’re on the cutting edge,” Cooley said. “We’re trying things nobody has tried to do.”
Her day starts before the sun rises, traveling deep underground using the same elevator the original miners took in the 1920s.

It’s a bone-rattling three-minute drop in complete darkness, taking Cooley 2,000 feet under the earth’s surface.

And it is a striking case of old meets new, where the most sophisticated technology known to man is found in a mine that was dug in the late 1800s.

Read the full story.

Tags Dedman College, Jodi Cooley, SMU Department of Physics

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Energy & Matter Researcher news SMU In The News

Science News: SMU’s Cooley hopes dark matter search in Minnesota mine will yield results

Post author By Margaret Allen

Post date September 3, 2010

Book a live interview

To book a live or taped interview with Jodi Cooley in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

The search for mysterious dark matter at an abandoned mine in Minnesota is the subject of “Mining for Missing Matter” in the Aug. 28 issue of Science News.

Journalist Ron Cowen interviewed SMU scientist Jodi Cooley, an assistant professor of experimental particle physics in the SMU Physics Department.

Cooley is a member of a scientific collaboration investigating dark matter, the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment. It is located deep in the Soudan Underground Laboratory.

Cooley and her collaborators reported in the journal Science that they couldn’t rule out that they may have seen a glimpse of dark matter.

Physicists have been searching for dark matter — the substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe — for decades.

Related links

Jodi Cooley
Video: Jodi Cooley at SLAC
CDMS: Lay explanation of the research findings
SMU CDMS home page
Symmetry Magazine: Dark Matter Experiment Results Announced
Fermilab: Dark matter and supersymmetry FAQ
CERN: Recipe for a Universe
SMU Department of Physics
Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences

More SMU Research news

Africa’s cell phone boom can’t trump dire need for schools, roads, power, water

Research could change course of treatment for cancer that spreads to bones

Cowan writes: ” ‘My hope is that the next generation of experiments will discover dark matter” within the next few years,’ says CDMS II researcher Jodi Cooley of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. After making their initial discovery, researchers could then tailor experiments to unveil dark matter’s detailed nature, she says.”

EXCERPT:

“The workers have journeyed deep into the Earth to plumb the darkest depths of the cosmos, hunting for the missing material believed to account for 83 percent of the universe’s mass.

That material, known as dark matter, must exist, astronomers say, because the cosmic allotment of ordinary, visible matter doesn’t provide enough gravitational glue to hold galaxies together. Although the missing material shouldn’t be any more prevalent in the underworld than above ground, dark matter hunters have good reason to frequent Soudan and other subterranean lairs. Because dark matter particles would interact so weakly, experiments designed to detect the dark stuff could easily be overwhelmed by the cacophony of other particles. So scientists at Soudan and elsewhere use Earth’s crust to filter out cosmic rays — charged particles from space that bombard Earth’s atmosphere.

Physicists have been directly searching for dark matter for more than two decades. But until recently, only one experiment, beneath a mountain in central Italy, had consistently reported evidence of the invisible particles. Now two more experiments have found similar hints. When taken together, the findings suggest that the most popular models for dark matter may not be correct — the particles pegged have a lower mass than many physicists had proposed.

Read the full story

Tags Dedman College, Jodi Cooley, SMU Department of Physics

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Energy & Matter SMU In The News

BBC: Scientists report they may have glimpsed dark matter

Post author By Margaret Allen

Post date February 12, 2010

A scientific group of experimental particle physicists have reported in the latest issue of the journal Science that they cannot rule out that they may have seen a glimpse of dark matter.

Physicists have been searching for dark matter — the substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe — for decades. Jodi Cooley, an assistant professor of experimental particle physics in the SMU Physics Department, is a member of the collaboration on the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS II) experiment.

The experiment is located deep in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in an abandoned mine in a national park in Minnesota.

More SMU Research

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3D dinosaur track

Hunt for Higgs boson

BBC News reported on the published results in a Feb. 11 article “Study hints at dark matter action” by the BBC’s science reporter Doreen Walton and published to the BBC News web site.

Cooley, quoted in the BBC article, said “Either we had a statistical fluctuation in our background or it could be that these two events are evidence of dark matter but there weren’t enough of them to be sure.”

Excerpt:

By Doreen Walton
BBC News
Researchers in the U.S. say they have detected two signals which could possibly indicate the presence of particles of dark matter.

But the study in Science journal reports the statistical likelihood of a detection of dark matter as 23 percent.

Deep underground in a lab in Minnesota experiments to detect WIMPS, or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles have been going on since 2003. Scientists are currently developing an even more sensitive experiment.

“It’s a very difficult situation,” said Professor Jodi Cooley from Southern Methodist University, Dallas in the U.S., who led the research. “In some ways I feel we’ve been very unlucky.

“Either we had a statistical fluctuation in our background or it could be that these two events are evidence of dark matter but there weren’t enough of them to be sure. We can’t rule them out as being a signal but we can’t conclude that they are a signal.”

Read “Study hints at dark matter action“

The scientific findings were published in the journal Science on Feb. 11, “Dark Matter Search Results from the CDMS II Experiment.”

Excerpt:
Astrophysical observations indicate that dark matter constitutes most of the mass in our universe, but its nature remains unknown. Over the past decade, the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS II) experiment has provided world-leading sensitivity for the direct detection of Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter. The final exposure of our low-temperature Ge particle detectors at the Soudan Underground Laboratory yielded two candidate events, with an expected background of 0.9 – 0.2 events. This is not statistically significant evidence for a WIMP signal.

Click to read the full abstract.

Cooley and her colleagues earlier announced the groundbreaking CDMS findings at dual press conferences on Dec. 17. The team, known as the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, hosted simultaneous talks by Cooley at the SLAC National Acceleratory Laboratory in California and by Lauren Hsu of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois at Fermilab.

Scientists of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment are listening for whispers of dark matter. Inspired by his brother Erik’s research, musician Karl Ramberg built a musical model of the CDMS detector, in collaboration with CDMS scientists. Erik Ramberg and Priscilla Cushman translated real CDMS data into a format that accurately converts the energy, location and type of particles striking the CDMS detectors into sound and light. Cushman created this 5-minute video.

Related links:
CDMS: Lay explanation of the research findings

Video: Jodi Cooley at SLAC

Jodi Cooley

SMU CDMS home page

Symmetry Magazine: Dark Matter Experiment Results Announced

Fermilab: Dark matter and supersymmetry FAQ

Fermilab images: Cryogenic Dark Matter Search

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

CERN: Recipe for a Universe

Nobel Prize: Why is there something instead of nothing?

Fermilab: Dark Universe Debate

SMU Department of Physics

Tags Dedman College, Jodi Cooley, SMU Department of Physics

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Energy & Matter Researcher news

NY Times, Scientific American: SMU physicist presents team’s important dark matter find

Post author By Margaret Allen

Post date December 18, 2009

Physicists have been searching for dark matter — the substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe — for decades. Now an international collaboration of physicists working in an abandoned mine in Minnesota have announced there’s a chance they may have spotted a glimpse of the subatomic particles.

One of two scientists presenting the finding simultaneously on opposite coasts was physicist Jodi Cooley, an SMU assistant professor of experimental particle physics.

The New York Times and Scientific American, among others, were there to take note. The Times article “At a Mine’s Bottom, Hints of Dark Matter” was reported by Dennis Overbye and was published in the Dec. 17 edition of The Times.

Scientific American‘s John Matson reported the story in “Dark Matter Researchers Still in the Dark as Underground Search Returns Uncertain Results” also on Dec. 17.

Excerpt:

By DENNIS OVERBYE
The New York Times
An international team of physicists working in the bottom of an old iron mine in Minnesota said Thursday that they might have registered the first faint hints of a ghostly sea of subatomic particles known as dark matter long thought to permeate the cosmos.

More SMU Research

New Paluxysaurus mount

3D dinosaur track

Hunt for Higgs boson

The particles showed as two tiny pulses of heat deposited over the course of two years in chunks of germanium and silicon that had been cooled to a temperature near absolute zero. But, the scientists said, there was more than a 20 percent chance that the pulses were caused by fluctuations in the background radioactivity of their cavern, so the results were tantalizing, but not definitive.

Gordon Kane, a physicist from the University of Michigan, called the results “inconclusive, sadly,” adding, “It seems likely it is dark matter detection, but no proof.”

Dr. Kane said results from bigger and thus more sensitive experiments would be available in a couple of months.

The team, known as the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, announced its results in a pair of simultaneous talks by Jodi Cooley from Southern Methodist University at the SLAC National Acceleratory Laboratory in California and by Lauren Hsu of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois at Fermilab, and they say they plan to post a paper on the Internet.

Read “At a Mine’s Bottom, Hints of Dark Matter“

Excerpt:

By JOHN MATSON
Scientific American
A hotly anticipated announcement regarding a possible signature of dark matter delivered some grist for the physics mill Thursday but failed to produce the blockbuster result some had predicted. In a Webcast talk from Stanford University, Jodi Cooley, a particle physicist at Southern Methodist University, presented the latest results from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search 2 (CDMS-2), a series of detectors buried deep underground in a former iron mine in northern Minnesota. (The first CDMS experiment was located at Stanford, much closer to the surface.) CDMS-2, she said, detected two signals that fit the bill for the passage of dark matter particles, but other possibilities could not be ruled out.

Dark matter is thought to make up roughly a quarter of the universe but has never been directly observed. In present-day estimates of the universe’s makeup, ordinary atoms (such as those we detect as the visible universe) contribute only about 5 percent; the bulk of the cosmos takes the form of so-called dark energy, under whose influence the universe is expanding at an increasing clip. Dark matter’s presence has for decades been inferred from its gravitational effects on large-scale structures such as galaxy clusters, but because it does not interact much with ordinary matter and does not emit or absorb light — hence the “dark” moniker — it has so far proved impossible to observe firsthand.

Read “Dark Matter Researchers Still in the Dark as Underground Search Returns Uncertain Results“

Other coverage:
Live blogging: Discover
Science News
U.S. News & World Report
The Seattle Times

Related links:
CDMS: Lay explanation of the research findings
Video: Jodi Cooley announcing from SLAC
Jodi Cooley
Symmetry Magazine: Dark Matter Experiment Results Announced
Fermilab: Dark matter and supersymmetry FAQ
Fermilab images: Cryogenic Dark Matter Search
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
CERN: Recipe for a Universe
Nobel Prize: Why is there something instead of nothing?
Fermilab: Dark Universe Debate
ATLAS
CERN FAQ
SMU Department of Physics
Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences

Tags Dedman College, Jodi Cooley, SMU Department of Physics