| Title | A New Model for Dark Matter | |
| Date | Friday September 05 2014, @04:08PM | |
| Author | Woods | |
| Topic | ||
| from the shedding-light-on-awful-puns dept. | ||
A just-released paper Researcher advances a new model for a cosmological enigma—dark matter offers a novel model of dark matter, dubbed "flavor-mixed multicomponent dark matter." From the article:
"Dark matter has not yet been detected in a lab. We infer about it from astronomical observations," said Mikhail Medvedev, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas, who has just published breakthrough research on dark matter that merited the cover of Physical Review Letters, the world's most prestigious journal of physics research.
Medvedev's theory rests on the behavior of elementary particles that have been observed or hypothesized. According to today's prevalent Standard Model theory of particle physics, elementary particles—categorized as varieties of quarks, leptons and gauge bosons—are the building blocks of an atom. The properties, or "flavors," of quarks and leptons are prone to change back and forth, because they can combine with each other in a phenomenon called flavor-mixing.
"In everyday life we've become used to the fact that each and every particle or an atom has a certain mass," Medvedev said. "A flavor-mixed particle is weird—it has several masses simultaneously—and this leads to fascinating and unusual effects."
Medvedev said that dark matter may interact with normal matter extremely weakly, which is why it hasn't been revealed already in numerous ongoing direct detection experiments around the world. So physicists have devised a working model of completely collisionless (noninteracting), cold (that is, having very low thermal velocities) dark matter with a cosmological constant (the perplexing energy density found in the void of outer space), which they term the "Lambda-CDM model."
But the model has hasn't always agreed with observational data, until Medvedev's paper solved the theory's long-standing and troublesome puzzles.
"Our results demonstrated that the flavor-mixed, two-component dark matter model resolved all the most pressing Lambda-CDM problems simultaneously," said the KU researcher.
The original of the article seems to be on the Kansas University web site. According to: Cold Dark Matter is often called Lambda-CDM:
Cold Dark Matter is an abbreviation for Lambda-Cold Dark Matter. Cold Dark Matter represents the current concordance model of Big Bang cosmology that explains cosmic microwave background observations, as well as large scale structure observations and supernovae observations of the accelerating expansion of the universe. Cold Dark Matter is the simplest known model that is in general agreement with observed phenomena.
I am fascinated by stories on cosmology but have only a passing understanding of the material; is there a physicist or cosmologist around who would like to weigh in and shed some light on the subject?
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printed from SoylentNews, A New Model for Dark Matter on 2023-07-11 04:17:58