But they usually say this with a big smile. And the fun has not stopped despite the recent announcement by Italian physicists that they had found the first hint of the elusive dark matter . The discrepancies indicate that the universe is filled with some kind of extraordinary material. One way to do so is supersymmetry , which arranges a dynastic marriage between the two particle families. The search for sparticles is a central goal of particle physics today.
WIMPs are physicists' best candidate for the astronomers' dark matter.
By an intriguing coincidence, the number of such particles that would have been created by the big bang approximately equals the amount of extraordinary dark matter deduced by astronomers. WIMPs are comparatively static, which is how the Italian group claims to have found them. The team, known as DAMA and led by Rita Bernabei of the University of Rome, relies on scintillators, a type of particle detector that looks for the light given off as particles strike atoms. To pick WIMPs out from other particles, such as those given off by naturally occurring radioactivity, DAMA watches for the seasonal fluctuation predicted by American astrophysicists Andrzej K. Drukier, Katherine Freese and David N. Spergel in 1986. Whereas the solar system orbits around the center of the Milky Way, WIMPs should have no organized motion.