DAMA

In Italian language DAMA means a lady or draught the well-known game that people commonly plays with a chessboard. But it is also the name of a fundamental experiment carried out at INFN laboratories at Gran Sasso in Italy and headed by physicist Rita Bernabei (you can find here an article by her just in Italian, sorry) . Rita Bernabei was one of my teachers at “La Sapienza” in Rome and I took an examination with her. Recently a preprint by DAMA Collaboration was published on arxiv causing a lot of rumors in the scientific community. The point is that they see a signal that nobody else sees. This evidence cannot be denied and the signal is there.

Personally I am convinced of the goodness of all this matter and sometime happens that something is seen by a group and not by others and things could be generally explained after some time. In my activity field a similar thing happened for the sigma or f0(600) resonance. This particle has a long history as initially was put in the PDG listing and then removed as believed non-existent. After a lot of serious analysis, both theoretical and experimental, its existence has been commonly accepted and now the question is moved to the understanding of its nature. We have discussed this matter here, here and here. This particle is our key to understanding of low energy behavior of QCD and we expect some news about in the near future. Similarly, I think the current position of DAMA collaboration is the same as was for the first observations of the sigma. Being the firsts sometimes requires a lot of patience before general acceptance gets through.

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