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This is, I am sure, a dumb question, but I read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XENON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XENON and I just don't know enough to com
by zw123456 8y ago
This is, I am sure, a dumb question, but I read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XENON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XENON and I just don't know enough to completely understand the concept, but my dumb question is how do they know the event they saw was a spontaneous decay and not caused by a WIMP or whatever Dark Matter is? If it is such a rare event, how do we know that it wasn't a dark matter particle that caused it but the reaction was different than anticipated ? Can anyone take on a ELI5 here ?
- lisper 8y agoIt's not quite as rare as the article makes it out to be. It's not like they by chance happened to detect a single event that only happens every few trillion years. They had a TON (actually three tons) of xenon. Decay events happened every few days, and they collected over 100 of them. Those events have a particular "signature" that allows them to be distinguished from other kinds of events. Even then, they needed to apply statistical methods to compute the odds that the data they were seeing was real and not from random chance, and the result was that the odds were not quite high enough to qualify as a discovery by the usual standards. Details are in the original paper, which is pretty accessible: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.11002.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.11002.pdf
- KeenFox 8y agoI'm always amazed at how much good science happens based on inferring things from what's known or guessed with high confidence.
- lisper 8y agoWhy is that amazing? How would you expect it to work?
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- jschwartzi 8y agoThe most powerful phrase in statistics is "suppose that it is..."
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