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• And when the switch is flipped later this year to start collecting data, scientists say it could be a Higgs boson-style celebration all over again.
• "Dark matter presents a much bigger problem to detect and is more speculative than the Higgs," said Tom Shutt, a physics professor with Case Western Reserve University who's working on the Large Underground Xenon detector, known as LUX.
• "If we find it, it's going to be a much bigger shift in our understanding of physics."
• A breakdown for laymen: The Higgs boson is a subatomic particle that scientists believe gives other particles mass. Scientists earlier this month announced a breakthrough in the existence of Higgs boson, sometimes called the "God particle" because its existence is key to understanding the early evolution of the universe.
• Dark matter, meanwhile, is elusive matter that scientists believe makes up about 25 percent of the universe. They know it's there by its gravitational pull, but unlike regular matter and antimatter, it's so far undetectable.
• Regular matter, such as people and planets, make up about 4 percent of the total-mass energy of the universe. By discovering dark matter, scientists could explain why the universe isn't made up equally of matter and antimatter. That, in turn, could explain how the world as we know it came to be.
• The Sanford Underground Research Facility was unveiled in May 4,850 feet beneath the earth within the closed Homestake Gold Mine in Lead, a town nestled in South Dakota's Black Hills. Lead is nearly 400 miles west of Sioux Falls, close to the Wyoming state line.
• The mine opened in 1876 during the area's gold rush but shuttered in 2003 after a slow decline in the value of gold.
• The mine is useful for this project because dark matter is too sensitive to detect in normal laboratories. By setting up LUX nearly a mile underground -- and then (Continued on page 21)
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