|
by Patrick Caughill
March 24,
2017
from
Futurism Website
Credit: Institute for Basic Science
Long ago,
physicists identified and
categorized
the components of the visible
universe.
Up until recently, 16 particles
formed everything
in the known universe.
But now, thanks to the efforts
of physicists at CERN
working with the Large Hadron
Collider (LHC),
we have added another particle,
the Higgs boson,
to the Standard Model of
physics.
However, there is an entire hidden - or dark - aspect of physics and
our natural world for which
the Standard Model just can't account,
even with
the Higgs boson.
To put it plainly, all of
the matter that is visible is not enough for the universe to behave
as it does.
There has to be
some kind of invisible matter and energy making all of what we can
see possible.
To account for this mystery, scientists theorized that
there must be Dark
Matter and
Dark Energy.
These would be made
up of a completely different set of particles that we have yet to
discover, probably because we simply do not know how to study them.
A new study (Portal
Connecting Dark Photons and Axions)
by researchers from the
Institute of
Basic Science (IBS)
in South Korea suggests that we have found
the way to bridge the gap between the visible world and the dark
sector of physics: portals (stargates).
Portal to the Dark
Sector
Now, when you hear
of portals, you likely think of some
science fiction adventure or
debates on whether the cake is a lie, but we're not talking about
those kinds of portals.
These portals would
exist in the quantum realm, the scale of which is nearly
incomprehensibly small.
These portals have
been dubbed "dark axion portals," based on the two hypothetical dark
sector particles scientists have already postulated:
-
the axion
-
the dark photon
An
axion is a theoretical particle thought to be very light, much
lighter than an electron, that theoretical physicists believe could
solve some mathematical problems with the standard model.
Dark photons are theoretically like photons that make up visible
light, except that we cannot easily interact with or detect them.
Click to View Full Infographic
The
communication between the visible and the, "dark" particles
would be facilitated by heavy quarks (one of the quantum
particles in the Standard Model) also having a dark charge.
Having such
a charge would allow the quark to couple to dark photons,
thus bridging the gap between the two "worlds."
"The
dark axion portal suggests the first meaningful
connection between the two physics, which have been
studied separately: it connects the dots," lead
researcher LEE Hye-Sung said in
an IBS press release.
"This
will allow reinterpretation of the previous data, and
potentially make a breakthrough in the axion and dark
photon searches."
The team is
now working on proposing experiments that would use these
portals to actually decipher, once and for all, if axions
and dark photons really do exist.
We may
never know all there is to know about the universe, but we
are definitely working to close that gap.
|
