The current experiment I'm involved with is
called XENON1T.
It's a dark matter experiment located under
the mountains of the Gran Sasso in central
Italy where we have the largest underground
laboratory worldwide.
We are searching for the dark matter which
fills this universe — 85 percent of the
matter in the universe is invisible, is dark.
And despite the efforts for decades, we still
don't know the nature of dark matter.
So we have many hypotheses, many candidates.
The most favorite one remains today the WIMP
— the weakly interacting massive particle.
And so we are searching for WIMPs in liquid
xenon with the XENON1T experiment — waiting
for an interaction of this particle with an
atom in the nucleus of the xenon which is
inside our beautiful detector and capitalizing
on the properties of this liquid xenon to
detect these signals very precisely.
So the experiment is the largest so far until
now and the most sensitive for direct detection
of dark matter.
It just started to operate at Gran Sasso at
the laboratory, and we're all very excited
to discover WIMPs in liquid xenon with the
XENON1T experiment.
