SoylentNews

RandomFactor writes:

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters University of Chicago and Fermilab scientists lay out a way it might be possible to spot dark matter's tracks.

Theorists think there's one particular kind of dark particle that only occasionally interacts with normal matter. It would be heavier and longer-lived than other known particles, with a lifetime up to one tenth of a second. A few times in a decade, researchers believe, this particle can get caught up in the collisions of protons that the LHC is constantly creating and measuring.

One theory suggests that the Higgs boson could actually decay into the 'long lived' dark particles.

Wang, UChicago postdoctoral fellow Jia Liu and Fermilab scientist Zhen Liu (now at the University of Maryland) proposed a new way to search by exploiting one particular aspect of such a dark particle. "If it's that heavy, it costs energy to produce, so its momentum would not be large—it would move more slowly than the speed of light," said Liu, the first author on the study.

The only problem is sorting out these events from the rest; there are more than a billion collisions per second in the 27-kilometer LHC, and each one of these sends subatomic chaff spraying in all directions.

The time delay of the slower moving particles is the key.

The difference is less than a billionth of a second, but it is within the range the detectors can suss out and the upgrade the LHC is undergoing will increase that sensitivity even further.

The trap is already being built by experimentalists. The LHC will turn back on in 2021 with increased detection and energy at which point it will be time for the hunt to begin.

Interesting that plain old Higgs bosons might be the key to opening the door on dark matter.

Original Submission