Supercooled water in “snowball chamber” might be able to find dark matter

Enlarge / Still photograph of supercooled water turning into snow, shot on an iPhone camera at 120 FPS slow-motion. (credit: Matthew M. Szydagis)

Like many people, physicist Matthew Szydagis has been amused by all those YouTube videos showing people banging on a bottle filled with water, causing it to quickly freeze in response to the blow. The trick is to supercool the water beforehand-that is, cool it below the freezing point without the water actually freezing. (Yes, it's possible.) But when he saw the same phenomenon depicted in Disney's 2013 animated film Frozen, he realized he might be able to exploit the effect to hunt for dark matter, that most elusive of substances.

The result is his so-called "snowball chamber," which relies on a newly discovered property of supercooled water. A professor at SUNY's University of Albany, Szydagis gave an overview of this research at the American Physical Society's annual April meeting, held earlier this month in Washington, DC. A draft paper can be found on arXiv, and a final version is being prepared for journal submission.

"All of my work is motivated by the search for dark matter, a form of matter we're sure is out there because we can observe its indirect gravitational effects," Szydagis said. "It makes up a significant fraction of the universe, but we have yet to uncover direct, conclusive and unambiguous evidence of it within the lab." The detector could also be useful for detecting nuclear weapons in cargo, for understanding cloud formation, and for studying how certain mammals supercool their blood when they hibernate.

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