CDMS Live

• 16:41. Welcome to the live commentary from the CDMS seminar starting today at 2pm Pacific time at SLAC. It might be the event of the year, or the flop of the decade. Though most likely it will be a hint of the century.
• 16:50 Our seminar room is starting to get packed. The webcast from SLAC will be projected on a big screen.
• 17:00. The SLAC seminar has started! The speaker is Jodi Cooley.
• 17:06. Dark matter history. Zwicky, Ruben, rotation curves, bullet clusters. No way around it, we have to suffer through that....
• 17:09. There is also a webcast of the Fermilab seminar here. They are ahead of SLAC...
• 17:12. Now talking at length about WIMPs. Does it mean they see a vanilla-flavor WIMP?
• 17:14. A picture of a cow on one of the slides.
• 17:15. Fermilab already got to the gamma rejection. We are watching the wrong webcast, booo.
• 17:18. Jodi starts describing the CDMS experiment.
• 17:20. Previous CDMS results at Fermilab. They're getting close.
• 17:30. We switched to the Fermilab talk here in Rutgers. Now the speaker is Lauren Hsu. She seems faster.
• 17:35. Very technical details about phonon timing and data quality monitoring.
• 17:38. Expected backgrounds. Finally some important details.
• 17:39. Estimated cosmogenic neutron background 0.04, and similarly for radiogenic ones.
• 17:40. Surface event background estimated at 0.6.
• 17:45. They are talking about expected limits. Scaring. They don't have a signal? If there were no signal they would obtain two times better bounds than the last time.
• 17:47. Rumors reaching me, of 2 events at 11 and 15 keV.
• 17:49. It's official: 2 events. One at 12 keV, the other at 15 kev.
• 17:49. There are additional 2 events very close to the cut window, approximately at 12 keV.
• 17:58. Now discussing the post-unblinding analysis and the statistical significance.
• 18:00. Both events were registered on weekends. Grad students having parties?
• 18:01. The significance of the signal is less than two sigma.
• 18:04. One of the events has something suspicious with the charge pulse. A long discussion unfolds.
• 18:12. After post-unblinding analysis the signal significance drops to 1.5sigma (23 percent probability of the background fluctuation).
• 18:14. The new limits on dark matter $4x10^{-44} cm^2$ for a 70 GeV WIMP. Slightly better (factor 1.5) than the last ones.
• 18:17. Inelastic dark matter interpretation of the DAMA signal is not excluded by the new CDMS data.
• 18:18. Nearing the end. The speaker discusses super-CDMS, the possible future upgrade of the experiment.
• 18:20. Summarizing, no discovery. Just a hint of a signal but with a very low statistical significance. Was fun anyway.
• 18:20. So much for now. Good night and good luck. The first theory papers should appear on Monday.

A summary by CDMS here, and the paper here (on Arxiv password-protected untill Sunday evening; if you can't wait click here). See also a much better live commentary from eye-witnesses on Cosmic Variance.