What did Santa bring the world of particle physics?

In short, Santa has brought the world of particle physics a huge hint and a leveling pain. The CDMS experiment (a direct dark matter detection group) has just published their latest results and the verdict is....WE CAN'T SAY ANYTHING!!!

As you can see from above the results of their search show two events in the signal region...and two more events so damn close you could sneeze them into the signal region. What does it mean?

Well with an expected background of +/- 0.8 events it means it isn't statistically significant enought to say anything.

It should be noted that in their previous results they had roughly the same background but had to report 0 events. So going from 0 to 2 events after adding another year of data is important...but in principal could be a statistical fluctuation.

So what is direct dark matter detection?

In a nut shell the argument goes like this...if dark matter is as pervasive in the universe as we believe then our planet, our solar system, and our galaxy is swimming in a sea of dark matter. However, this dark matter is very weakly interacting but very massive (called W.I.M.P.S., Weakly Interacting Massive ParticleS) so we can observe its existence indirectly by looking at how it interacts gravitationally.

That being said, even if the stuff doesn't interact with ordinary matter that much, if we but a whole bunch of dense material in a place where nothing else can interact with it and keep it very cold so it isn't vibrating around thermally. Then in a very rare case when one of the dark matter particles that is zipping through our planet hits some of the dense material we should be able to observe it. That is what the detectors at CDMS do.

They are very dense materials kept at near absolute zero at the bottom of a huge mine in the northern part of the U.S. Often dubbed the "Low Background Frontier" they are extremely sensitive and hold the best chance for finding dark matter directly.

With the tantalizing results of 2009 I'm sure they will be carefully and feverishly taking data in 2010 to try to beat the LHC in direct detection of dark matter

So could it be that Santa has brought us some direct detection of Dark Matter and solved a great puzzle in physics? Stay tuned in 2010!