Facilities and Experiments

Experiments at the Cosmic Frontier

Project Status: Operating

Cryogenic Dark Matter Search

The CDMS experiment is located in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota, shielded from cosmic rays and other particles that could mimic the signals expected from dark matter particles. Scientists operate the ultrasensitive CDMS detectors under clean-room conditions at a temperature of about 40 millikelvin, close to absolute zero. Physicists expect that weakly-interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, if they exist, travel right through ordinary matter, rarely leaving a trace. If WIMPs crossed the CDMS detector, occasionally one of the WIMPs would hit a germanium nucleus.