Almost everything is missing. And a team of physicists is attempting to seek out all of it.
The universe as we all know it includes a few tenths of the whole stuff that is out there. The rest? Missing. Invisible. Undetectable, except through the results of its gravity on the fraction of stuff that we will see. Researchers decision that missing stuff the dark sector — the category of energetic and large particles that apparently should exist out there somewhere however that do not move with aglow matter (the stuff we’re manufactured from, alongside everything we will see) in any method we will find.
There’s a new project at the National Institute for atomic physics in Italy that is attending to try and unlock all that dark stuff victimization the theoretical dark gauge boson (the dark-sector version of normal light-carrying photons) because of the key. And if they really notice the dark gauge boson, it’ll give proof for the universe’s fifth force — which might be Brobdingnagian news in physics.
According to a report within the Guardian, Italian researchers commit to bombard a diamond wafer with a beam of matter particles referred to as positrons, that area unit the matter versions of electrons. beneath traditional circumstances, positrons and electrons that smash into one another decimate one another, manufacturing a try of normal photons.
But if dark photons very exist, then each once during a whereas, a positron-electron annihilation ought to turn out one. rather than the interaction expectoration out 2 regular photons, a dark gauge boson and an everyday gauge boson would emerge facet by facet, The Guardian rumoured.
The researchers told Physics World that they hope that the beam of positrons in their experiment, that they decision Padme, can crash into enough electrons within the diamond to supply a dark gauge boson. Padme will not be ready to find that dark gauge boson directly; instead, a missing gauge boson can function proof. A positron-electron annihilation that produces a dark gauge boson can look to Padme like a number of its energy simply disappeared, as a result of it’ll have entered the dark sector.
If that happens, the researchers expect to be ready to make sure the existence of the dark gauge boson and live its mass. (Unlike regular photons, dark photons have mass, in step with The Guardian.)
That would be proof of not simply a brand new particle however additionally a wholly new force.
In the aglow universe, there area unit four forces. Electromagnetism carries lightweight energy and binds atoms to alternative atoms. (As The Guardian noted, it is the reason you do not miscarry your chair.) The strong interaction holds the particles within atoms along. The weak interaction causes atoms to crumble and decay. And gravity, the fourth force we will find, pins you to the planet and governs the movements of the cosmos.
If dark photons exist, The Guardian rumoured, then they’d be the manifestation of a fifth force entirely — one not gift in our prevailing model of the universe: dark electromagnetism. If one turns up in Padme (and that is a giant if; past hunts for dark photons have turned up nada), then it’ll very be time to rewrite the physics textbooks.
