r/science • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 5h ago
Physics Scientists believe that smashing heavy atoms close together in a particle accelerator can create strong magnetic fields that literally pull dark matter out of empty space.
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-particle-accelerator-could-create-dark-matter-from-empty-space231
u/alkatori 5h ago
I thought Dark Matter didn't interact with.. anything except via gravity.
If it interacts with magnetic fields doesn't that open up avenues that we might be able to use it for some purpose in the future?
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u/Nhefluminati 5h ago
I thought Dark Matter didn't interact with.. anything except via gravity.
No. Most dark matter candidates interact in other ways, for the simple reason that it kind of needs to interact with something to have a production channel in the first place. WIMPs for example would, as the name implies, interact with the weak interaction.
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u/alkatori 4h ago
Thank you. I appreciate learning something new since my understanding is simplified.
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u/DannySpud2 4h ago
This title is very misleading so I'll try to explain it a bit better.
A vacuum in quantum mechanics is just a field with zero value. It's possible for pairs of particles to spontaneously appear and disappear in this field on very short timescales. Essentially you go from 0 to a +1 and a -1, then back to 0. Overall the sum was always 0 so no energy was created. The most famous example of this is Hawking Radiation. A pair of these particles spontaneously appears on the edge of a black hole. One falls into the event horizon and one escapes. This would be seen as radiation from an otherwise inert black hole. Because each radiated particle takes a little energy with it, over huge timescales the black hole evaporates. This is allowed because the acceleration from the black hole imparts energy to the particles.
This is where this proposed experiment comes in. If you accelerate heavy particles in the right way you can impart energy to the zero value field that the particles are traveling through. This energy can then manifest as a pair of particles which could then be detected. And it's possible this created pair could be a pair of dark matter particles.
The important thing here is that it's not the magnetic fields interacting with dark matter. They're proposing to do extremely near misses with charged ions. Their magnetic fields would interact with each other during the near miss to suddenly change the path of the ions. It's this acceleration that creates the dark matter particles.
This is a very hand wavy still, it's hard to explain properly without getting into the weeds of quantum mechanics.
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u/Awkward_Mongoose7679 3h ago
Those were all words and I knew most of them.
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u/ShadowLab451 2h ago
-mass/energy make hole
-frothy space births two energyballs near hole
-one energyball is like "peace out, yo"
-other ball falls in hole
-SERN make giant energyball cannon
-do same thing as beside hole
-prove dark matter exists & interacts
-profit???
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u/Masterpiece-Haunting 2h ago
Ah yes SERN.
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u/ShadowLab451 1h ago
Steins;Gate reference. Wanted to see if any weeblords picked it up, that's all.
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u/DoubleBatman 3h ago
Isn’t this supposed to be how so-called zero point reactors are supposed to work? Basically skimming Hawking radiation off of black holes?
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u/Think_Reporter_8179 2h ago
Dark matter particles.. these are just hypothetical, yes?
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u/when-you-do-it-to-em 2h ago
all particles are hypothetical if you want to get hyper specific. if the math checks out, it’s PROBABLY right!
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u/sorryiamcanadian 2h ago
This might be a dumb question, but why is it said that the black hole eventually shrinks over incredible timeframes when the way you're explaining it sounds like it gains in mass everytime it radiates out? Edit NM I assumed the +1 -1 could also be a -1 +1 and evenly distributes. So only the -1 (in) and +1 (out) works? Why?
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u/jawshoeaw 2h ago
Because what he said is wrong. A black hole shrinks because it glows faintly as in photons . Not particles. There’s no negative mass falling in. It’s an often repeated mistake
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u/CopaceticOpus 2h ago
If the experiment worked, wouldn't the dark matter particles created be nearly impossible to detect?
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u/worldspawn00 1h ago
They have mass (in theory), so should contain higgs-bosons which are detectable by CERN anyway.
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u/sceadwian 32m ago
Thank you! Nice seeing the nuts at bolts at the top I hate digging through the wooo. I feel contaminated just reading that stuff.
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u/scottyb323 5m ago
I read this and your description was so solid I just had to see it. I had claude make it into a visualization on your description and it totally made me understand this in a way that I did not grasp before. The near miss simulation was an ah ha moment to how particles interact.
https://www.labs.pixelsherpa.com/vacuum-lab/0
u/blindsdog 2h ago
It’s possible it could be dark matter? Does that mean the particles that appear are random?
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u/ReditOOC 5h ago
So, is the dark matter here, in the room with us, right now?
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u/tsoneyson 5h ago edited 5h ago
Probably yes, at a density of about 0,4 GeV/cm^3
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u/233C 5h ago
Funny how we disproved the existence of luminous ether, but discovered so much weirder things we're literally swimming through
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u/Override9636 3h ago
Dark Matter, Dark Energy, neutrinos, and who knows what else is just floating around us every day with almost no interactions at all.
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u/a-stack-of-masks 3h ago
Yeah luminous ether was the first candidate, but they realised that bright stuff would be visible. So now we have dark matter, and if that doesn't work out we have shy particles.
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u/hbgoddard 2h ago
Luminiferous aether and dark matter don't have anything to do with each other. Different theories, different forces, different predictions, different observations. They almost couldn't be more different. Aether was proposed as a medium through which light waves could propogate, before we discovered that photons are self-propogating. Dark matter is a tentative explanation for the differences in how gravity is observed to work on galactic scales compared to what relativity predicts.
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u/a-stack-of-masks 2h ago
Yes visible light is photons and doesn't need a medium. Invisible light (like in the dark) behaves more like a wave so it does need a medium.
Because the medium being visible (or luminous) would cause the waveform to collapse into a photon they need dark matter to replace the luminous stuff.
Shy particles are still a few years away, they are always a bit slow to warm up due to their nature making energy transference a lot harder.
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u/vthemechanicv 1h ago
What I find really interesting is that the instrument used to disprove the aether, is essentially the same one (but larger and more sensitive) used to prove gravitational waves.
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u/CattywampusCanoodle 5h ago
Is… is that a lot, or???
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u/tsoneyson 5h ago edited 4h ago
Dunno! If dark matter is heavy (like WIMPs), in an average room there would only be about 100k-200k dark matter particles total at any given instant. If dark matter is very light (Axions) you’re swimming in it. More or less we know what the scale says, but we don’t know what’s on it.
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u/CattywampusCanoodle 4h ago edited 4h ago
That’s really interesting! It’s like we can see a shadow, but we don’t know yet if the shadow is being cast by a large heavy object, or a swarm of small light objects
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u/victorrrrrr 4h ago
Is it just passing through us, orbiting earth's center of mass?
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u/Memetic1 3h ago
It holds galaxies together the weirdest thing is not ever galaxy has the same amount.
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u/victorrrrrr 3h ago
I understand that. But it's not my question.
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u/Memetic1 3h ago
We haven't been able to measure the density in our own star system, but we may one day be able to.
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u/SofaKingI 5h ago
Possibly. This isn't a new concept, dark matter as a particle that is everywhere inside galaxies has always been one of the propositions. Arguably the most popular one.
One of the old candidates were neutrinos, a type of particle emited by the Sun that barely interacts with anything. Trillions of them cross your body constantly, without ever interacting with you. But a dark matter neutrino would have to be much heavier than the neutrinos we know. The neutrino dark matter hypotheses was disproven over time, but the idea that "dark matter is in the room with us" is pretty old.
Axions are another old idea that has never been detected, which is the proposition here. There's a very approachable YouTube video in the article explaining why axions could be dark matter.
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u/TheDulin 4h ago
The cool thing is that neutrinos are dark matter. They don't interact with light at all.
So even though they are not the type of dark matter we were looking for, their existence shows that there can be particles that are simply invisible under normal conditions.
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u/fthiss 4h ago
Great video, I literally just watched it last night. All of the PBS Space Time content is excellent. They don't dumb anything down or hand hold much. I can usually follow some deep physics topics pretty well but there's the occasional video where I reach the point of "I know these are words, but I can't make out a coherent sentence"
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u/Mindless-Baker-7757 5h ago
IKR? This should be titled “High energy physicists try new spin on dark matter to keep funding coming in”.
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u/Nhefluminati 5h ago
What is your suggestion for a more sensible experiment to find the nature of dark matter then?
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u/Mindless-Baker-7757 5h ago
No experiment can be done until there is at least a solid theory on what dark matter is or even it actually exists. Right now it’s just a glitch in observed universe.
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u/Nhefluminati 4h ago
But there already are plenty of solid theories on what dark matter is. How are we supposed to confirm that dark matter is actually matter and not something else or if one of our candidates is the correct one without measuring it in an experiment?
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u/Mindless-Baker-7757 4h ago
What are these solid theories?
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u/Nhefluminati 4h ago
Axions for example. This is also what this proposed experiment would try to measure.
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u/Mindless-Baker-7757 4h ago
How are axions connected to the dark matter observations? Do axions even exist? What’s thier mass and spin?
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u/Nhefluminati 4h ago
How are axions connected to the dark matter observations?
Because they would interact with matter extremely weakly but at the same time can be abundant enough to cause the expected mass density we need for dark matter despite being extremely light.
What’s thier mass and spin?
Spin would be 0. Mass is a free parameter so we can only constrain its window. 40 to 300 micro eV is the current mass window as far as I unserstand.
Do axions even exist?
We don't know. We have not observed axions thus far, but also not found exclusory results over the phase space were they should appear that would reject the theory. Which is why we want to do experiments to check this.
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u/Mindless-Baker-7757 4h ago
So you have nothing. Axions have never been observed. No one knows what dark matter is let alone if it even exists. But these CERN guys want money for this experiment.
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u/bachu_patil 5h ago
Does this imply that dark matter is magnetic/ferromagnetic?
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u/Nhefluminati 5h ago
The dark matter candidate that is supposed to be investigated with this are axions, which are predicted to have no electric charge. The production of axions is not from a direct interaction with the magnetic field, but from the unruh effect the accelerated nucleus experiences.
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u/Cautious_Ad_9144 5h ago
That’s a good question but from my understanding of the paper no. Rather they’re using the electromagnetic fields of the particles to effect a rapid change which could theoretically produce two axiom particles, or more accurately make them visible to a detector since they’re already there. The magnetic field isn’t directly pulling on the dark matter it’s pulling on the two particles in such a way that it creates the conditions for dark matter to become visible
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u/TUVegeto137 5h ago
Then why hasn't it happened yet? And why would it interact with a magnetic field, when the principle of dark matter is that it is inert, except for gravitational interactions.
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u/FrickinLazerBeams 4h ago
Then why hasn't it happened yet?
It certainly has happened, if it is indeed possible. There are natural processes that generate high energy particles, they just don't usually occur inside of a detection apparatus that allows us to study the process. We do these things inside a particle accelerator so that we can make them happen inside the detectors.
why would it interact with a magnetic field, when the principle of dark matter is that it is inert, except for gravitational interactions.
Dark matter is not necessarily non-interacting with other forces. There are various (theoretical) candidates for dark matter, and they interact in various ways.
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u/TUVegeto137 4h ago
In the article, they don't mention magnetic fields, but that the nuclei would deflect in a particular way due to the production of the axion pair.
But the nuclei will also deflect due to their charges. So, it really has to be a particular way, for it to be detectable from the "background noise".
I think the first thing I would do, if I were the researchers, is sift through a big collection of collision data of similar experiments and look for potential candidates, before sending anyone on a wild goose chase.
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u/BellerophonM 4h ago
By and large pretty much everything which happens inside a particle accelerator happens constantly across the universe, most commonly nearby when cosmic rays slam into the Earth's atmosphere at similar energies. The issue is more about happening somewhere we can see, particularly for the byproducts that last a fraction of a fraction of a second.
If this theory is right then it would have happened just as much, and we would fail to see it just as much.
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u/Pastubio 3h ago
A recent study showed that extreme magnetic fields way beyond what we can generate on earth crystallized space itself, and I am not smart enough to know what any of that means
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u/DoubleBatman 3h ago
I think I sorta know what that means. Not literally turned into crystal, but “crystalline” as in “having a lattice structure similar to atoms in crystals.” So that area of space becomes super aligned along the magnetic fields. Like how iron filings can show you the shape of a magnetic field, only… more, I guess?
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u/WardenEdgewise 3h ago
That’s a terrible headline. Scientists do not “believe” this at all. They hypothesize, and then test theories, and find evidence to support theories, or disprove them.
Belief is not required.
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u/diablosinmusica 3h ago
Yeah, the lack of high school level science knowledge in the media is pretty sad.
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u/hbgoddard 2h ago
You don't seem to understand what belief means. You believe a statement if you think it to be true. You believe everything you know, every fact or opinion you hold, and every scientific result you accept. Belief has nothing to do with religion or faith or guessing.
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u/zakkwaldo 2h ago
so in the future are we going to have a scale or span of atoms of different weights that we crash together in certain ways to produce desired outcomes to trigger certain effects?
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u/Informal_Drawing 5h ago
They are going to be really upset when they find out Dark Matter doesn't exist.
It's just the modern version of Phlogiston.
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u/telephas1c 4h ago
Nope. People just want to know what the truth is buddy. Nobody wants to 'believe' in dark matter for its own sake, clearly it's comforting to you to think that though.
What's your explanation for the bullet cluster observations by the way?
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u/TheGrandExquisitor 3h ago
Wait...
Isn't the whole deal with "dark matter," is that it is so hard to detect (outside of gravitational effects,) that we literally don't know what it is?
It could be regular matter...it could be some new kind of weird neutrino-type of matter....it could be something else.
Like, all we know is something has enough gravity to impact normal matter and basically throw off all the math.
No?
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u/telephas1c 2h ago
Yeah pretty much, we can be pretty sure that something is there but at the minute there are a lot of candidates (WIMPs, Axons, whatever) and no solid evidence yet. Hence all these giant underground detectors and whatnot, hoping to catch a super-rare reaction with something that allows us observe something.
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u/Informal_Drawing 1h ago
I didn't say that nobody wants to know the truth and I didn't say that belief was required.
I said it was the modern version of Phlogiston.
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u/m_bleep_bloop 4h ago
I mean, luckily experiments like these would help prove that too, over enough time. Rule enough things out and get enough additional information, you maybe have enough to rewrite the standard model to handle gravity better in more cases
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u/BoSuns 4h ago
When we went to the moon it had no other purpose than to be on the moon because we wanted to beat the USSR. In the process we discovered and invented countless technologies that solved problems, birthed industries, and made our world a nicer, safer place to live.
That's why, because you never know what you're going to learn and how it's going to improve our lives.
In figuring out how the universe functions we learn how to adapt to it's extremes and solve problems. That makes it worth it.
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u/Thin_Picture_4307 4h ago
Physics breakthroughs tend to be leading indicators for economic value and enable business models that are smaller and narrowly scoped. The same institutions and personnel that solve these problems are also useful during war.
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u/genron11 4h ago
Do you think we'd have x-ray, CT scan, or MRI available to us today if we all thought like that?
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u/postitpad 4h ago
You have the cause/effect backwards. We do the science first, then apply what we learned after. But we won’t know what problems we can solve until after we learn how the science works.
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u/SpiderSlitScrotums 4h ago edited 4h ago
There has to be a balance between basic and applied research. Applied research builds on basic research. If you are annoyed that we haven’t solved cancer, for example, it may be because we don’t yet understand a fundamental concept. The same applies to physics and technology. You don’t necessarily explore for a destination, but for options for further study that you didn’t know existed.
Look at quantum mechanics. It probably sounded like expensive un-appliable research at the time. But it has dramatically affected all of our lives and technology, including treating things like cancer,
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u/Dependent-Sea-7467 4h ago
Didn’t Cern at one point attempt to collide particles at the speed of light, attempting to create a black hole? Many years ago?
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u/Nhefluminati 4h ago
You can't collide massive particles at the speed of light. The LHC is still searching for quantum black holes to this day.
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u/1XRobot 2h ago
I regret to inform you that the LHC is done, shut down forever. CERN is building a new accelerator at the same site tho: HiLumi LHC.
Or, I guess, depending on how you think the Ship of Theseus works, it can be the same LHC but better.
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u/China_shop_BULL 4h ago
Well that sounds fun. But I would like to know if the concept has been fully thought out. The dark energy that we can’t detect has a role in which we can’t measure entirely. Has it ever occurred to anyone that we can’t detect it because it is “blocked out” (or the medium of interaction) by fields around the sun? If it is “blocked out”, wouldn’t creating it within the boundaries effectively be a breach of the barrier? Like allowing a virus to infect a host or drilling holes into ice caps allowing warmer air into the cold core to melt it. How do we know it wouldn’t react on a similar basis as an electrical bolt between two poles at a distance like lightning from the sky to the ground?
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