Virtually Pure Argon May Whisper Secrets About Universe’s Dark Matter

University of Houston Researchers Create Facility for Mining Exceptionally Pure Argon from Colorado Site

A deposit of practically pure argon that has been left untouched since Earth’s formation will help physicists know more about the universe.

The Urania Project, led by Andrew Renshaw, University of Houston associate professor of physics in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, will supervise the installation and commissioning of an industrial-scale structure in southwest Colorado with a $2.9 million National Science Foundation grant. Concurrently, in Sardinia, Italy, researchers will certainly design and build a specialized processing plant that will certainly be sent to Colorado with assistance from the Italian funding agency Istituto Nazionale Fisica Nucleare (INFN).

Inside the combined facility– the processing plant built in Italy and the outer structure built onsite by the Urania Project (called for the Greek muse of astronomy)– the argon will be drawn out, purified, and shipped to Laboratorio Nazionale Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Italy. There, it will be utilized in the search for answers to some of the universe’s most challenging puzzles.

A noble gas

Argon is a noble gas and chemical element with the atomic number 18, belonging to the periodic table’s group 18 with the symbol Ar. 

Argon accounts for approximately 0.00015 percent of the crust, making it the most abundant noble gas in the Earth’s crust. It is also the third-most abundant gas in the Earth’s atmosphere, representing 0.934 percent of the total (9340 ppmv). 

Nonetheless, before the group can look outward among the stars, they first must reach deep inside the Earth.

Extraction and processing

To be precise: They must attend the extraction and processing of argon gas located in a southwest Colorado natural gas drilling site run by Kinder Morgan, a Houston-based drilling and pipeline company.

“Our facility will exist as a side operation to Kinder Morgan’s Doe Canyon facility, which is currently drawing CO₂ (carbon dioxide) from the Earth’s mantle as part of its natural gas mining,” Renshaw stated. “Contained within this CO₂ stream coming from those deep underground Kinder Morgan wells is a percentage of low-radioactivity argon, which turns into a byproduct in their production of natural gas however is a tool that we can utilize. This is fascinating because the low-radioactivity argon can be a significant asset to our research, as it is an extremely good element to utilize inside a low-background particle detector.”

Inevitably, the argon is separated from the CO₂ at Kinder Morgan’s site, then shipped in high-pressure cylinders specifically designed for this project to Sardinia, where it will undoubtedly be further processed and then shipped to LNGS for insertion into the underground detector called DarkSide-20k.

“Once the argon is liquified, it can be utilized at the LNGS research site to detect particles based on how they interact with the liquid argon,” Renshaw stated. Through those studies, the team wishes to piece together evidence of the universe’s dark matter and acquire the ability to identify neutrinos from astrophysical sources.

Argon (abbreviated Ar)– colorless, odorless, tasteless– is listed on the far-right side of the periodic table with the other five “noble gases” (implying they are inert or virtually chemically unreactive). Being one of the most common of Earth’s elements, argon is seen virtually everywhere. Researchers can gather it effortlessly from the atmosphere.

Why is this specific argon in Colorado so significant to the Urania project and the DarkSide-20k experiment in Italy?

“Because it is nearly 100% argon-40, having been protected deep underground since the earth’s formation,” Renshaw discussed. “During the same period, the atmosphere’s argon has been continuously bombarded by cosmic rays, packing it with argon-39, which after that decays via beta emission and can cloud the DarkSide-20k particle detector’s signals. This indicates that the argon extracted from deep underground in Colorado will allow DarkSide-20k to be filled with nearly 100% pure argon-40, considerably minimizing the overall background rate of the detector and allowing for several sensitivity studies to be done.”

What the researchers hope to expose with the DarkSide-20k particle detector (anticipated to be in operation for a decade, beginning in 2025) are signs of dark matter in the universe– what it is, how it acts, and why it exists. In other words, they wish to bring light to among the darkest mysteries of the cosmos.

Read the original article on ScitechDaily.

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