6:36am Wednesday 10th September 2008
© Press Association 2011
Scientists working from a tiny laboratory at the bottom of Britain's deepest mine could beat a multibillion-pound Swiss project to crack the mystery of creation.
The team hope to pinpoint dark matter - the cosmic glue which is thought to bind together the universe.
If they succeed, they could snatch some of the glory from scientists operating the £3.5 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
And it would be a huge stride forward for scientists seeking to understand how the universe works.
The scientists operating the LHC, a 27km (16.8 mile) circumference particle accelerator built beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, expect to trace dark matter within two years.
But their rivals, based in a £2 million underground laboratory in Cleveland, could succeed in half that time.
Housed at the bottom of Boulby potash mine, where millions of tons of minerals used for fertiliser and for gritting roads is extracted every year, researchers from Edinburgh University and Imperial College London and STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have, with US, Portuguese and Russian collaboration, built two of the most sensitive astro-particle detection machines known to science.
Both of their detectors are looking for "Wimps" - weakly interacting massive particles - which are as yet unobserved sub-atomic particles scientists believe may account for dark matter.
To do this, for the "ZEPLIN-III" detector they have filled a large tank with the inert liquid xenon and fitted it with detectors that can spot the flashes of light that should be produced when wimps occasionally strike xenon atoms.
Their other detector, "DRIFT", is the world's only directional dark matter detector - "a dark matter telescope" and is a one metre cubed metal chamber containing a low pressure gas.
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