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posted by mrpg on Friday April 19 2019, @07:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the always-look-on-the-dark-side-of-life dept.

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 largeā€”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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @05:58PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @05:58PM (#832227)

    You do realize that the historical "dark ages" you're riffing on were not literally dark, in the sense that technological or cultural progress was retarded, it's just that we don't have many records (written or archaelogical) of the goings on during that period.

    As such, your analogy is flawed.

  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:05AM (2 children)

    by darkfeline (1030) on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:05AM (#832405) Homepage

    All analogies are flawed. If it wasn't flawed, it'd be a tautology.

    --
    Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @06:20AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @06:20AM (#832462)

      For the purposes of this reply, I'll leave the issues I have with your statement aside.

      Regardless, GP's 'analogy' is so flawed that it isn't actually an analogy. Rather, it's just a big sign reading, "I'm ignorant of history! Hooray for me!"

      I'm waiting with bated breath for your exalted intelligence to descend its pedantic ass on that one. Oh joy.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @07:25AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @07:25AM (#832474)

      I was going to leave this until tomorrow, but I'm having a bit of insomnia so we'll go with it now.

      Lucky you!

      There are good analogies and bad analogies.

      Good analogies compare something that gives the reader either more familiar situations or imagery, as a mechanism to understand a concept or idea, or to convincingly suggest that said situations or imagery are akin to the concept or idea you're comparing.

      Bad analogies attempt to do so and fail.

      If two ideas are identical, there's no point in creating an analogy, as they are inherently equivalent. The value in analogies is that they elucidate an idea or cast a particular idea in a way you'd like the reader to view that idea.

      As such, your complaint about all analogies being flawed or they're tautologies is inane, irrelevant and (unless you were ignorant of the purposes and uses of analogies) probably offered in bad faith.

      Thanks for sharing!