As scientists develop supercold quantum technology to solve the universe's biggest mystery, the search for dark matter will become even cooler.
Cutting-Edge Quantum Technology in the Search for Dark Matter
Though dark matter makes around six times the proportion of ordinary matter in the universe, nobody knows what it is. This is mainly because no human experiment has been able to locate it.
To solve this problem, scientists from several universities in the UK have worked together to make two of the most accurate dark matter detectors ever thought of. These detectors will look for imaginary particles that could make up dark matter. Because they are all different, they will need other ways to find them.
To keep the equipment used in both tests from being affected by outside factors, it must be cooled to a thousandth degree above absolute zero. This is the temperature at which all atomic movement stops. A team member from Lancaster University named Samuli Autti talked about using quantum technologies at very low temperatures to make the most sensitive devices ever. He said that their goal is to look at this strange substance directly in the lab and figure out one of science's biggest mysteries that way.
Dark matter makes up about 80% to 85% of the world, but you can't see it because it doesn't interact with light or regular matter. Its presence can be inferred from how gravity affects things that can be seen, like the fast-spinning galaxies that astronomer Vera Rubin saw. Scientists think that dark matter might be made up of axions, which are very light particles, or bigger particles with weak interactions that we don't know much about yet.
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The Effort to Solve the Dark Matter Mystery
The Quantum Enhanced Superfluid Technologies for Dark Matter and Cosmology (QUEST-DMC) and Quantum Sensors for the Hidden Sector (QSHS) studies are two that scientists have come up with to find these hard-to-find particles. QUEST-DMC uses superfluid helium-3 to try to find dark matter particles colliding with ordinary matter. This will be the most sensitive detection ever.
However, it can't pick up very light axions, which is considered very common. The QSHS experiment will instead look for the minimal electrical signs made when axions break down in a magnetic field.
Differently and creatively, scientists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory want to find thermalized dark matter that Earth's gravitational field may have stuck by using quantum devices. These particles are thought to move more slowly and give off less energy than galactic dark matter, which means that regular scanners might miss them. The group believes these low-energy particles can be found by redesigning superconducting quantum devices, often messed up by unknown energy sources even at absolute zero.
Anyone can see the QSHS and QUEST-DMC devices at Lancaster University's Summer Science Exhibition. Visitors will see examples of how the presence of dark matter is inferred and learn about the very low temperatures needed for quantum technology. The team's study, published in The European Physical Journal C and on arXiv, is a big step toward finding dark matter directly and solving one of the most giant puzzles in science.
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