Tag: Jodi Cooley

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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Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Researcher news Technology Videos

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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Energy & Matter Learning & Education Researcher news SMU In The News

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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Public health insurance provides insured infants better, less costly care than private plans

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.

EXCERPT:

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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