The four-day DarkSide Young Academy (from March 4 to 7) ended on Friday , an event hosted by the Department of Physics of the University of Cagliari and organized by young researchers from the University of Cagliari and the Federico II University of Naples with the patronage of the University of Cagliari and the Cagliari section of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN). The event, held in the University Citadel and now in its second edition, involved young researchers from a class of European physics institutes that are part of the DarkSide-20k experiment.

"DarkSide-20k has the ambitious goal of discovering a new particle that could explain the large presence of dark matter , invisible in the universe, using a detector under construction at the Gran Sasso National Laboratories", explains Mattia Atzori Corona, a 27-year-old researcher who, with Nicola Cargioli and Sara Tullio, as well as two young researchers from the Federico II University of Naples, organized the event on behalf of the University of Cagliari. "This form of matter, identified and transmitted by physicists since the 1950s, still remains one of the greatest enigmas of contemporary physics. The argon used in the DarkSide-20k experiment", continues Corona, "is extracted from underground reserves in Colorado and transported to Sardinia in the mine shaft of the former Carbosulcis plant.

Here, in fact, a cryogenic distillation plant is being built as part of the Aria project, in which argon will be purified to reach levels never seen before." The project is coordinated by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and will build the highest cryogenic distillation column ever built in the world, with a height of about 350 meters.