Dark matter headline

New Analyses May Imply the Existence of a Dark Matter Particle. Reading further:

At a recent UCLA symposium attended by 190 scientists from around the world, physicists presented several analyses that participants interpreted to imply the existence of a dark matter particle.

The likely mass would be approximately 30 billion electron-volts, said the symposium’s organizer, David Cline, a professor of physics in the UCLA College of Letters and Science and one of the world’s experts on dark matter.

The physicists at the February 26–28 event were in agreement that “there seems to be an excess in the available data that could be due to dark matter,” Cline said.

"Source: UCLA Newsroom"

The conference proceedings are at this link, and are available to the public. Peruse freely. There are two semi-positive findings: Fermi and superCDMS. Fermi sees a narrow signal in the galactic center (too narrow, actually) where you expect a lot of dark matter to wind up, that has been decreasing with greater statistics. Worse yet, they see the same signal around the relatively small and lightweight Earth, which is a little like saying you see dark matter in your coffee cup. The other experiment sees a small excess of events--not enough to claim a discovery--and most of the excess is in a detector with a grounding flaw.

Where does this "in agreement" come from? Maybe from the people that try to do big bang evolution with different particle models; I'm pretty sure it isn't from the experimentalists.

The headline rang wrong immediately, but when I read the article I understood where it came from. I used to work for Prof. Cline. He is excellent at spreading ideas around from group to group, and quicker than I to pick things up, but he had a habit of jumping the gun. This is a better description of the dark matter playing field right now.