Case Western Reserve University physicists and others from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment announced they have regained the lead in the worldwide race to find the particles that make up dark matter. The CDMS experiment, located a half-mile underground in a Minnesota mine, again sets the world's best constraints on the properties of dark matter candidates.

So far, a dark particle hit has not rung the crystal bell in the detectors in the mine. "We are the best in the world at finding nothing! But this also has major scientific implications about the presence of dark matter in the universe and how far scientists have to go in their search to find it. It tells us about which hypothetical models for dark matter can be ruled out or falsified," said Daniel Akerib, professor and chair of the physics department and member of the CDMS team.

A race is on in Case Western Reserve University's physics department and around the world to be the first research group to capture signals from WIMPs (weakly interactive massive particles)—the substance that comprises dark matter.

Experts in the field suspect whoever tracks and verifies WIMP signals first will be the leading contender for a Nobel Prize in physics. Two of the top competitors currently work just down the hall from each other in the physics department at Case Western Reserve: Thomas Shutt and Daniel Akerib.

"It is exciting to have key players from the two most powerful dark matter detection searches in the world here in our department," said Lawrence M. Krauss, the Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Case Western Reserve. "If dark matter particles are directly detected one day, it is very likely to be with one of these experiments, and we will be proud of the remarkable efforts of both groups even as we bask in the realization that either way, the Case Western Reserve physics department has taken the lead in this most important endeavor."

As evidence of expanding universe disappears from observations

Lawrence Krauss

When Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter proposed a static model of the universe in the early 1900s, he was some 3 trillion years ahead of his time.

Now, physicists Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer from Vanderbilt University predict that trillions of years into the future, the information that currently allows us to understand how the universe expands will have disappeared over the visible horizon. What remains will be "an island universe" made from the Milky Way and its nearby galactic Local Group neighbors in an overwhelmingly dark void.

The researchers' article, "The Return of the Static Universe and the End of Cosmology," was awarded one of the top prizes for 2007 by the Gravity Research Foundation. It will be published in the October issue of the Journal of Relativity and Gravitation.