Maybe you've heard the big news about LUX-ZEPLIN, the dark matter detector. They put 10 tonnes of liquid xenon in a tank, 1.5 kilometers down in a mine. The idea is if that if dark matter is made of weakly interacting massive particles, these might hit a xenon nucleus and make it emit some light.

They've been waiting for 280 days and they haven't seen anything interesting. That's the big news. 😕 They claim this rules out the possibility that dark matter is made of weakly interacting massive particles that are more than 9 times as heavy as a proton.

It must be somewhat discouraging doing this work. To paraphrase one of the team members: "we are the world leaders in not detecting dark matter". But it's good that people are trying. While you may have already decided physicists will never find dark matter, they have to actually look. In particle physics, you never discover a new particle until you do.

Alas, it's completely possible that dark matter is made of stuff that 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 interacts gravitationally with other matter, so that we'll never find it with detectors like LUX-ZEPLIN, yet it still exists.

It's also completely possible that something other than dark matter - something we don't understand yet - is making galaxies spin faster than they should given the matter we see, and form earlier than they should given the matter we see, and so on. But while this is easy to say, it's incredibly hard to make up a theory that explains all these phenomena without dark matter! People are trying to make up new theories of gravity that do the job, but these theories have a lot of problems.

So, the mystery endures.

https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2024/08/26/lz-experiment-sets-new-record-in-search-for-dark-matter/