How the Large Hadron Collider Will Hunt for Dark Matter (msn.com) 64
It's the world's largest particle accelerator — and after a three-year pause for upgrades, CERN's Large Hadron Collider now detects more data, runs at higher speeds, and performs at its highest energy level ever — a whopping 13.6 trillion electron volts.
Will that prove the existence of dark matter? The Washington Post reports: Though scientists largely believe dark matter is real, none have been able to see or create it. Data collection and power upgrades made to the particle smasher could provide researchers one of their best chances to visualize and understand the substance.... Inside the collider, superconducting magnets are chilled to roughly minues-456 degrees Fahrenheit — colder than space — while two particle beams traveling close to the speed of light are made to collide. Using advanced sensors and monitors, scientists analyze the substances created by those collisions, which replicate conditions similar to the Big Bang. It allows them to learn about the earliest moments of the universe...
During the Large Hadron Collider's four-year experiment, scientists are hoping to find evidence of dark matter. As they fire up the machine, protons will spin at nearly the speed of light. The hope, researchers said, is that when they collide, it creates new particles resembling the properties of dark matter.... "High-energy colliders remain the most powerful microscope at our disposal to explore nature at the smallest scales and to discover the fundamental laws that govern the universe," said Gian Giudice, head of CERN's theory department....
If CERN scientists do not discover dark matter in the next four years, they have more upgrades in the works. The upgrades are likely to take three years after the current run stops, leaving the fourth round of data collection and experiments to start in 2029.
As planned, the trial could capture 10 times more data than previous experiments, according to CERN's website.
Will that prove the existence of dark matter? The Washington Post reports: Though scientists largely believe dark matter is real, none have been able to see or create it. Data collection and power upgrades made to the particle smasher could provide researchers one of their best chances to visualize and understand the substance.... Inside the collider, superconducting magnets are chilled to roughly minues-456 degrees Fahrenheit — colder than space — while two particle beams traveling close to the speed of light are made to collide. Using advanced sensors and monitors, scientists analyze the substances created by those collisions, which replicate conditions similar to the Big Bang. It allows them to learn about the earliest moments of the universe...
During the Large Hadron Collider's four-year experiment, scientists are hoping to find evidence of dark matter. As they fire up the machine, protons will spin at nearly the speed of light. The hope, researchers said, is that when they collide, it creates new particles resembling the properties of dark matter.... "High-energy colliders remain the most powerful microscope at our disposal to explore nature at the smallest scales and to discover the fundamental laws that govern the universe," said Gian Giudice, head of CERN's theory department....
If CERN scientists do not discover dark matter in the next four years, they have more upgrades in the works. The upgrades are likely to take three years after the current run stops, leaving the fourth round of data collection and experiments to start in 2029.
As planned, the trial could capture 10 times more data than previous experiments, according to CERN's website.
Hope this continues (Score:2)
Regardless they find what they are expecting or find something else, or even find nothing, I hope this sort of "big science" always continues.
We may not have an immediate use for it's discoveries, but discovering the fundementals always helps with things in the longer terms.
And the few billions it cost is considerably more worth then spending on all the pork *SLS* *cough* or the MIC.
Be Vewy Quiet! (Score:3)
We're hunting Neutwinos!
Probably (Score:4, Funny)
Less than 72 hours after CERN turned back on again we've had:
>Sicily is now a stone's throw from Italy (2 miles) instead of with a significant blue gap (Mandela effect)
>Green skies in North Dakota
>All of Canada dropped offline and they won't say why
>The Georgia guidestones exploded
Coincidence? COINCIDENCE? Only the subject of this comment can say.
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You don’t wat to read Craig Harrison’s The Quiet Earth, then!
Or we could be wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
We assumed that energy was continuous as we observed in reality, until it wasnâ(TM)t.
We observed the sun circling the earth, until we changed perspective.
If dark matter is not found in the next four years, and there is not a good theoretical basis for that failure, something else might be going on. It cant be turtles all the way down.
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We assumed that waves and particles acted as we observed the to at large scale, were real, and described reality. Until the didnâ(TM)t
False, we still observe large scale matter distributions like galaxies to follow relativity - we have examples of galaxies stripped of dark matter making them work as we would expect. This has all but destroyed modified Newtonian dynamics and it’s barely surviving in radically altered and less believable forms. For your premise to be correct, all examples would need to behave consistently- something observation has rejected.
We assumed that energy was continuous as we observed in reality, until it wasnâ(TM)t.
Energy is only quantized for some quantum systems, others are continuous.
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But we also asked that our math and physics be beautiful, which is the basis of what Einstein did, why Feynman had to show that both approaches to QM were equal mathematically, and why we still look for magnet on. It could be that some kid who is starting college toda
Very Simple Theoretical Basis for Failure (Score:2)
If dark matter is not found in the next four years, and there is not a good theoretical basis for that failure
There is a very good, and very simple, theoretical basis for not observing dark matter: it may only couple through gravity. So far that's the only force that we know couples to dark matter. If we are to see it in any foreseeable experiment then it also needs to couple through some other mechanism because gravitational interactions are tens of orders or magnitude too small to detect.
The likely candidates through the weak or higgs bosons although there are others, such as axions mixing with photons etc. H
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From my (limited) understanding, I think dark matter would have to interact with *something* other than gravity, or else it would be massless and hence go flying at the speed of light and be unable to clump together in galaxies. That something could be (hopefully) the Higgs but I guess it could also be some kind of "fifth force" that doesn't interact with normal matter, in which case we're still going to have a hard time detecting it.
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Mass and gravity are very, tightly linked, so I'd not expect it to go flying off. Quite ordinary matter, such as old, cold planets not large enough to form stars or proto-stars, would serve well since they'd be dense and small enough not to occlude anything, but enough of them could provide just such "missing" matter.
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From my (limited) understanding, I think dark matter would have to interact with *something* other than gravity, or else it would be massless
That's not true. One model for dark matter is that it is made of primordial Black Holes formed in the Big Bang. These are large macroscopic objects that to a good approximation only interact through gravity. However, even models like Supersymmetry could have the gravitino (super-partner of the graviton) as the dark matter particle - although it's usually not a favoured type of model.
The problem with mass in the Standard Model is that it breaks some of the symmetries of nature that we observe experimenta
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"Dark matter" need not be exotic, merely a measurement artifact of measuring the mass and distance of objects billions of light yers away. Alternatively, it could be cold, dark baryonic matter such as interstellar and intergalactic planets which would not show up on any current scans. We keep discovering more and more exoplanets as our telescopes improve, potentially enough to alter galactic formation and the expansion of the entire universe. It's not as exciting a theory as exotic forms of peculiar matter
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"Dark matter" need not be exotic, merely a measurement artifact of measuring the mass and distance of objects billions of light yers away.
Not really. This has been largely, if not entirely, ruled out. For example, the Bullet Cluster shows that ordinary matter and dark matter can be separated by collisions and this is exceptionally hard to explain by any model other than some form of dark matter since it would require a gravitational field to exist where there is no matter.
it's just the sort of theory to consider when the evidence involves the deduced size of galaxies deduced as billions of years old and billions of light years away
The problem with that is that there is strong evidence for dark matter in our own Milky Way [www.cbc.ca] galaxy which, in cosmological terms, is no distance away at all. No uncertainty
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It is interesting to see. We're also recently proving the existence of a significant black hole near the center of our galaxy, which is profoundly distorting ideas of galactic evolution. Couple it with the increasing discoveries of quite ordinary, baryonic in stellar neighborhood, cold and dense and difficult to detect and it creates fundamental skew in our assumptions of stellar density and galaxy size, whether or not such matter is distributed consistently. It can and does raise questions about our quite
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It therefore casts doubts on the complex and exotic matter filled models of the universe which are so much more exciting than double-checking the original measurements for systemic skew.
No, actually it does not. The evidence for dark matter being exotic comes from multiple sources but the primary one is the cosmic microwave background. The scale of the clumping of the primordial plasma requires a form of matter which was slow moving and decoupled from the plasma: it cannot be explained by baryonic matter since this would strongly couple to the plasma and so not form clumps.
Then, looking at dark matter in today's universe, we see that whatever it is it has a radically different distribu
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> No, actually it does not. The evidence for dark matter being exotic comes from multiple sources but the primary one is the cosmic microwave background. The scale of the clumping of the primordial plasma requires a form of matter which was slow moving and decoupled from the plasma: it cannot be explained by baryonic matter since this would strongly couple to the plasma and so not form clumps.
The evidence for that kind of deduction is more than 10,000,000,000 years old, measured at distances more than 10
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> It cant be turtles all the way down.
Maybe ultimately everything is recursive and turtles created themselves and then jacked with time so that it's possible.
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a whopping 13.6 trillion electron volts. (Score:1)
That would be 13.6e12, or alternatively 13.6 TeV for the nerds.
This is why you don't use "B" to mean "billion". (Score:1)
Use the correct SI prefixes, or be clear that you're not. Then use "bn", "tn", and so on.
Tangentially, and pay attention now dear "editors": Poll idea. Should we expect science writers, including journalists, to understand at least the basics of the international system of units?
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Are you under the impression that it should be GeV? It's not, it's TeV, which is what the GP said and is consistent with the "trillion" used in the article.
And it would be great if science journalists understood units, but that should probably come as a stretch goal after "using a spell checker."
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If you can catch all your errors through proofreading, that's great for you. The article contains spelling errors that should have been caught by even the most basic electronic spell check so clearly the proofreading process, whatever it was, was poor.
You're quite late complaining though. We had this discussion on Slashdot more than a decade ago. The consensus, which seems to have been shared by much of the world at large, was that bloggers are perfectly good substitutes for professional journalists and are
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Well, in an article where you say things like "[minus]-456 degrees Fahrenheit" you can imagine that SI prefixes might be a bit of an issue, and there's probably going to be some weirdness around measuring systems.
what about the math? (Score:1)
i'm so confused about this search for dark matter. clearly it is very, very difficult to find. this is particular crazy given the level of the effect on the universe which is being assigned to it.
with the level of technology that is being applied to the search and the fact that it has failed utterly to find any, i'm very confused as to why we aren't seeing more discussion about how the underlying math might be incomplete.
99% of the discussion seems to be every more arcane attempts to find dark matter and 1
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You aren't paying attention to physical theories. Physicists question damn near everything and there are alternatives. Most tend to fail at some level. And the amount of physics and math you'd need to follow the discussion is a bit daunting.
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Hmm, there's a slightly tricky level of assumptions built into your first setence though, isn't there? Given that we cna't detect DM using anything other than gravity, then saying that we know of galaxies where DM is not present is equivalent to sayin that we observe some galaxies that behave as we'd expect under normal non-DM relativtiy.
It is therefore a bit of a stretch to use this as a justification of our existing theories, as a sort of snity check as you're implying. All we really have are some observa
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Now by smashing energy together they hope to find or prove that something with no energy exists...
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In quantum field theory adding a new particle just means adding a new field, which is done by adding a term in an equation. Adding a force is no different: new term in the equation, new field, new particle. So the people on Slashdot arguing passionately about "modified gravity" versus "particle dark matter" are really just passionately arguing about whether the new particle(s) have integer or half integer spin.
There's lots of interest in explaining dark matter with new forces, but so far the solutions gener
Hunt for Dark Matter (Score:2)
Have they tried simply checking Amazon [amazon.com] or Netfilx [netflix.com]? Seems like a *much* less expensive way to find Dark Matter [wikipedia.org] and building a multi-billion dollar super-collider ... :-)
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black matter, uhh, lives (Score:2)
they say it has to exist, due to 'math'.
it might exist, but just keep it away from red state cops, ok?
I like the MOND idea better (Score:2)
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-... [phys.org]
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We recently discovered a string of galaxies without dark matter. That makes MOND really unlikely.
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The MOND articles I have been reading are questioning the need/existence for dark matter. So finding a galaxy without it is good news for MOND?
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Well, you have two sets of galaxies that behave differently (rotation rate): galaxies with dark matter, and galaxies without. MOND could explain one of them, but not both.
What is Fahrenheit (Score:1)
I think that this is a news article about science; however, there is this strange word Fahrenheit.
Does anyone know what they are referring to?
Superconducting magnets are usually submerged in liquid Helium at 4 K.
Must be some relationship...
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Oblig... (Score:2)
How much (Score:2)
How much will it cost to keep increasing the energy of the LHC until they decide there is no such thing as dark matter if they don't find any in each upgrade?
Trillion shmillion (Score:2)
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An easier way... (Score:1)
An easier way to find dark matter is to walk in your living room, barefoot, in the dark - Guaranteed to stub a toe on dark matter. :)
Where does the energy go? (Score:1)