In the Italian Gran Sasso mountains elements of the dark matter are explored with the XENON1T detector. (Image: Xenon Collaboration)
The XENON1T detector is mainly used to detect dark matter particles deep underground. But a research team led by Zurich physicists, among others, has now managed to observe an extremely rare process using the detector - the decay of the Xenon-124 atom, which has an enormously long half-life of 1.8 x 10^22 years. A round 1500 meters deep in the Italian Gran Sasso mountains is the underground laboratory LNGS (Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso), in which scientists search for dark matter particles in a lab sealed off from any radioactivity interference. Their tool is the XENON1T detector, the central part of which consists of a cylindrical tank of about one meter in length filled with 3200 kilograms of liquid xenon at a temperature of -95 degrees Celsius. The rarest decay process ever measured. Until now, researchers using this detector have not yet observed any dark matter particles, but they have now managed to observe the decay of the Xenon-124 atom for the first time. The half-life time measured - i.e. the time span after which half of the radioactive atoms originally present in a sample have decayed away - is over a trillion times longer than the age of the universe, which is almost 14 billion years old.
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