IUSB physicist Ilan Levine continues pursuit of dark matter with NSF funds
Ilan Levine, associate professor of physics and astronomy at IU South Bend, has been awarded $217,365 of a $1.44 million total award from the National Science Foundation. The award is for continued research and engineering for constructing a large-scale version of the Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics (COUPP) dark matter detector in the U.S. National "Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory" (DUSEL). DUSEL is being constructed in the decommissioned Homestake gold mine in Lead, S.D.
Earlier this year, Levine also received $420,000 (to be spent over three years) from the National Science Foundation to continue his work on detecting dark matter. The research will be done on the IU South Bend campus. A large number of independent astronomical measurements indicate that about 90 percent of the mass of the universe is in some exotic form yet to be discovered called "dark matter." COUPP, an experiment being conducted by the University of Chicago, Fermilab and IU South Bend, is a bubble chamber-based detection technique to search for dark matter candidate particles called WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.)
WIMPS are predicted to exist by the current understanding of the basic constituents of the universe. WIMPS (if they exist) might be the dark matter. Because they interact so feebly with ordinary matter, researchers have only observed their joint gravitational effects. COUPP is meant to be able to directly see these rare and feeble interactions with ordinary atoms. In order to do so, researchers need a location for the experiment which is deep underground to shield the detector from cosmic rays which could create signals similar to those created by WIMPs.
DUSEL at Homestake will address the underground needs of all of the major scientific fields included in the NSF solicitation process: particle and nuclear physics, geology, hydrology, geo-engineering, biology, and biochemistry. Homestake is the deepest mine in North America with rooms at 8,000 foot, well-suited for experiments that require extremely low cosmogenic backgrounds.In particular, the search for neutrino-less double beta decay and relic dark matter.
The Yates Formation has well characterized strong rock that can support deep large cavities for very large multipurpose detectors for proton decay and neutrinos from many different natural sources. These large detectors can be used for long baseline neutrino experiments using beams from U.S. accelerator laboratories located at appropriate distances from Homestake.
For further information, go to these web sites:
The DUSEL home page: http://www.lbl.gov/nsd/homestake/
The COUPP homepage: http://www-coupp.fnal.gov/
Levine's research page: http://mypage.iusb.edu/~ilevine/Research/research_index.htm
