It takes half an hour to get to the laboratory. Thirty minutes may not seem like much, but it takes half an hour to plunge down in a truck into the Stawell Gold Mine.
The professor is unperturbed. The director of the center of excellence for dark matter particle physics has traveled many times below a kilometer of rock.
The lab has air conditioning but it gets hotter and more humid as the truck's headlights light up another sheer wall of rock.
One of the fundamental questions about our universe is whether dark matter exists.
Despite decades of research, the existence of the dark matter particles is still theoretical.
Without it the universe may not exist at all.
The rest of the universe is made of dark matter, invisible particles that don't produce light or interact with other objects.
"Wherever we are on Earth, we have thousands, if not millions, of dark matter particles passing through us and they don't affect us." Professor Barberio said that they are transparent to the particles.
The lab is at the bottom of the mine.
This research needs to be done deep underground to cut out the noise and radiation from the universe. Professor Barberio says that if you go deep enough, you can get rid of the Cosmic rays.
Italian scientists working on the DAMA/LIBRA project claim to have detected dark matter at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory which sits inside a mountain but the signal they detected fluctuates throughout the year.
When the Earth rotates around the Sun, dark matter particles are blown towards us. Professor Barberio says there's more dark matter if it's a wind.
There is a lab in the southern hemisphere where the Italian tests can be replicated and seasonal variations can't be ruled out.
The lab is similar to a Bond villain's underground hideout. Professor Barberio is in agreement.
I have a plan to take over the world. She doesn't laugh at the bad things.
The main experiment going into the underground lab is called SABRE South.
The lab is 33 meters long and 10 meters wide and has a 14-meter high ceiling.
Two very sensitive instruments, called photomultipliers, will be used at either end of the device.
The seven crystals that are being grown in the United States and China are placed in a tank filled with a liquid called benzene.
Professor Barberio says that if the dark matter particles interact with the crystal, they will produce a flash of light.
Many experiments have tried with many different elements, but it was the DAMA/LIBRA experiment in Italy that produced the light from what we think are interactions with dark matter.
The properties of the salt make it so sensitive.
The mass of the nucleus is important because of dark matter interacting with it. Different materials have different sensitivities to dark matter.
A nucleus with a large mass will be more sensitive.
Professor Barberio looks at my face.
Think of a game of billiards. You won't be able to move the big ball if you have a smaller ball. The billiard ball will crush everything if it's large.
You need to have two billiard balls that are the same size.
SABRE will be collecting data for a while. Italy's DAMA/LIBRA project has been gathering data for more than two decades.
It's hard to reproduce, it's so sensitive.
It won't take as long if we say "yes" or "no" to see the same signal as Italy.
If it is yes.
Five other experiments are trying to verify the results of the Italian research. It feels like a race to prove that dark matter exists.
The research team at Stawell is made up of scientists from several universities and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization.
Professor Barberio laughed when I said this.
This century will be one of the biggest discoveries ever, finding out what the universe is made of.
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