So in a sense while we are still looking to the April 3 Announcement from Cern, I thought I would lay out some information that had me stop to think and ponder about. If you ask me how this is all connected all you would have to do is surmise that my attention while directed to CERN, is also directed to the cosmological outlay of our universe.
So many experiments are connected, that while we do not see it’s significance in the experiments isolation, it is part of a much bigger plan to ask what it is, is at the basis of our progression and predictions about the causes of the universe.
- Clues to the nature of dark matter could come from evidence that high-energy neutrinos are produced in the Sun. The neutrinos, according to certain dark matter theories, would result from particles called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) becoming trapped by the Sun’s gravitational field and annihilating with each other. Now, the collaboration running the world’s largest neutrino telescope, the IceCube experiment at the South Pole, reports in Physical Review Letters its most comprehensive search to date for the predicted neutrinos. See: Synopsis: A Year-Long Search for Dark Matter
- We have performed a search for muon neutrinos from dark matter annihilation in the center of the Sun with the 79-string configuration of the IceCube neutrino telescope. For the first time, the DeepCore subarray is included in the analysis, lowering the energy threshold and extending the search to the austral summer. The 317 days of data collected between June 2010 and May 2011 are consistent with the expected background from atmospheric muons and neutrinos. Upper limits are set on the dark matter annihilation rate, with conversions to limits on spin-dependent and spin-independent scattering cross sections of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) on protons, for WIMP masses in the range 20–5000 GeV/c2. These are the most stringent spin-dependent WIMP-proton cross section limits to date above 35 GeV/c2 for most WIMP models.See: Search for Dark Matter Annihilations in the Sun with the 79-String IceCube Detector