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Research @ KICP
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Research Highlight August 20, 2004 A COUPP in the making by Juan I. Collar ![]() A new effort to search for particle dark matter, the Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics (COUPP), will debut at the end of 2004. A bubble chamber sensitive to Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) has been developed by KICP Assistant Professor Juan Collar, postdoctoral fellow Dr. Andrew Sonnenschein and several graduate and undergraduate students (Jason Hall, Dante Nakazawa, Kevin O`Sullivan and Aza Raskin). Many of the best-motivated dark matter candidate particles are WIMPs: particles with the required characteristics appear naturally in supersymmetric extensions of the standard model of particle physics. If these particles exist, they should occasionally collide with the nuclei of ordinary atoms in the laboratory, producing a signal that would be observable. The probability that this happens is nevertheless extremely small, imposing the need for very large detectors with extraordinary background rejection abilities. Bubble chambers can be built with a unique combination of features that make them attractive for detecting WIMPs, including sensitive masses up to thousands of times greater than those available with current alternative technologies, a wide choice of optimal target nuclei, intrinsic insensitivity to most backgrounds and relatively low cost. However, the classic bubble chambers, which were built for high energy physics experiments in the 1950s-'70s, were too unstable to detect WIMPs. ![]() Related Links: KICP Members: Juan I. Collar; Andrew Sonnenschein KICP Students: Jason Hall; Dante Nakazawa; Kevin O'Sullivan; Aza Raskin Scientific projects: COUPP/PICO |