Inside The Hunt For Dark Matter

“Turn here. Take the dirt road on the right. You’ve got to see this.” I park my rental car, and Rick Gaitskell directs me to a makeshift wooden observation deck overlooking the Trojan mine in Lead, South Dakota, just a mile down the road from his home. In the thickening twilight, we watch a phalanx of Caterpillar earth­movers scooping up and carting away chunks of a mountain, creating a large terraced pit. Nearby, a flat-crested ridge rises where the trucks have recently piled up rock from an earlier dig. Their piercing headlights mirror the glow of Venus, hovering just above the horizon.

“It’s incredible,” Gaitskell says. “There’s no stopping it. They are literally moving mountains in search of gold.” I try to read his expression in the dim light. At first, I assume he is expressing camaraderie with the diggers at the Trojan site. Technically speaking, he is a physics professor at Brown University, but it isn’t much of a stretch to say that he is also a fellow prospector.

Gaitskell leads a team that has just switched on the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, a hulking particle detector located almost a mile deep in the nearby Homestake Gold Mine. In effect, he is panning for dark matter, the invisible—and, for now, hypothetical—stuff that makes up five sixths of the mass of the cosmos. If he finds it, the Nobel committee will very likely come calling. Discovering just one dozen dark particles would be enough to throw all of modern physics for a loop. Considering the LUX experiment cost about $10 million to build, that puts the effective price of dark matter at, oh, about one million trillion trillion dollars per ounce. This is off-the-charts precious material.

“I’ve been looking for dark matter for 23, no, 24 years now,” he says. And he is not alone; the search for dark matter has grown into a small industry, albeit one that does not yet have a product to sell. “Every experiment has reported essentially negative results. No one even knows for sure if the damn stuff really exists. Those fellows,” Gaitskell says, nodding to the pit, “know exactly where the gold is.” I realize now he is not feeling empathy for the miners. He is feeling envy.

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