TL;DR
COSINE-100 and ANAIS-112 both reject DAMA's celebrated dark matter detection at better than 3 sigma.
MSM Perspective
Gadgets 360 covers the findings as a challenge to decades of dark matter claims from Gran Sasso.
X Perspective
Physics X celebrates the result as replication doing its job and calls DAMA's 13-sigma claim dead.
For a quarter century, the DAMA experiment at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy has claimed to detect dark matter through an annual modulation in its sodium iodide crystals — a signal that reached a statistical significance of 13 sigma, far beyond the threshold for discovery. Two independent experiments have now tried to replicate that result. Both failed. [1]
COSINE-100, operating in South Korea with 6.5 years of accumulated data, found no annual modulation consistent with DAMA's signal. ANAIS-112, running in Spain with 3 years of data, reached the same conclusion. Both experiments used sodium iodide crystals — the same detector material as DAMA — to eliminate the argument that the discrepancy was a detector effect. Together, they reject the DAMA signal at greater than 3 sigma. [1]
The implications are clarifying rather than crushing. Reina Maruyama of Yale, a COSINE-100 collaborator, told reporters the field should now focus on finding the real signal rather than debating a contested one. The SABRE experiment, with detectors in both hemispheres to control for seasonal systematics, is next in line. [1]
On X, the physics community treats this as replication working exactly as designed. MSM covers it as a setback for dark matter research. Neither frame is quite right. The DAMA result was never mainstream consensus — it was an outlier that demanded testing. Now it has been tested, and the field moves on.
-- KENJI NAKAMURA, Tokyo