Dr. Priscilla Cushman

We artificially say, okay, we're going to look at that first six months and we're going to start the next chunk of data.

What we learn about...

The first set of data, of course, will influence how we make that choice.

Perhaps we've actually fixed a few of the detectors.

Maybe we have a different physics goal in mind.

There are a number of different categories of dark matter.

There are electron recoil dark matter.

There's nuclear recoil dark matter.

There are solar axions.

We're actually looking for a lot of different candidates.

And so we might choose to concentrate on one or the other, depending on what we find in the first chunk of data.

Yeah.

In fact, I think that's the most likely explanation, honestly.

When we started this, we had a very specific theory in mind.

And that theory

turned out not to be a simple explanation for it.

We thought perhaps it was the lightest member of a supersymmetric family of new particles at the masses we expected, but then supersymmetry was not found at the LHC and direct dark matter experiments didn't find WIMPs where they were expected.

So that just tells us nature is more exotic and interesting than we thought, but it might also go to what you're saying that

When we talk about how much there should be, we're always talking about a mass density.

We know that from gravity, from astrophysical measurements, and from cosmology, that there's 85% of the stuff of the universe is dark matter.