Though we experience it more often (actually constantly) than electrical or magnetic forces, gravity is the weakest of these three forces. There are still other forces at work in nature, and faculty and students at IU South Bend are working with many other scientists from several nations to detect and learn about WIMPS - a particular type of particle that doesn't feel the stronger of these forces.
These Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS) are hypothetical as no one has yet detected them. Physicists postulate that they play a role in the supposed dark matter of the our universe. These mysterious particles are hard to detect because they have no electrical or magnetic properties and thus interact through only weaker forces, like gravity.
Last year we announced that chemistry graduates Joshua Benkhe and Adam Grandison were both to be acknowledged in a paper for their collaborative work with the IU South Bend Department of Physics and Astromony under the supervision of physicist Ilan Levine. That work is now published as Constraints on Low-Mass WIMP Interactions on 19F from PICASSO, Physics Letters B 711 (2012) 153-161.
More recently a paper that Joshua Benkhe actually coauthored has been published: First dark matter search results from a 4-kg CF3I bubble chamber operated in a deep underground site, Physical Review D 86, 052001 (2012). We are very proud of all our students who participate in undergraduate research and congratulate Benkhe and Grandison for their hard work. For addition information about student research in this collaborative effort between chemistry and physics please see our earlier post.
