Table of Contents
What are some possible candidates for this dark matter?
Candidates for non-baryonic dark matter are hypothetical particles such as axions, sterile neutrinos, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), gravitationally-interacting massive particles (GIMPs), supersymmetric particles, geons, or primordial black holes.
How can dark matter be created?
One leading hypothesis is that dark matter consists of exotic particles that don’t interact with normal matter or light but that still exert a gravitational pull. Several scientific groups, including one at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, are currently working to generate dark matter particles for study in the lab.
Is dark matter made of neutrinos?
Neutrinos are a form of dark matter, because they have mass, and weakly interact with light. But neutrinos have such a small mass and high energy that they move through the universe at nearly the speed of light. For this reason, they are known as hot dark matter.
What can weakly interacting massive particles do?
Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs, represent one hypothesized class of particles to explain dark matter. They neither absorb nor emit light and don’t interact strongly with other particles. But when they encounter each other, they annihilate and make gamma rays.
Can we capture dark matter?
Despite the almost overwhelming evidence that dark matter does indeed exist, we still don’t know what it’s made of. Detectors scattered around the world have been operating for decades, trying to catch the faint trace of a passing dark matter particle, but to no avail.
What are massive particles?
The term massive particle refers to particles which have real non-zero rest mass. According to special relativity, their velocity is always lower than the speed of light.
How big are weakly interacting massive particles?
The crystals (each about the size of a hockey puck) are cooled to about 50 mK. A layer of metal (aluminium and tungsten) at the surfaces is used to detect a WIMP passing through the crystal.
Is dark matter made of weakly interacting particles?
(PhysOrg.com) — For years, many physicists have accepted that dark matter is composed of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). The fact that WIMPs can naturally explain the amount of dark matter in the universe – left over from the Big Bang – has been described as the “WIMP miracle.”
What are the candidates for non-baryonic dark matter?
Candidates for non-baryonic dark matter are hypothetical particles such as axions, sterile neutrinos, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), gravitationally-interacting massive particles (GIMPs), supersymmetric particles, or primordial black holes.
What are the different types of dark matter detection experiments?
These experiments can be divided into two classes: direct detection experiments, which search for the scattering of dark matter particles off atomic nuclei within a detector; and indirect detection, which look for the products of dark matter particle annihilations or decays.
How much of the universe is made up of dark matter?
In the standard Lambda-CDM model of cosmology, the total mass–energy of the universe contains 5\% ordinary matter and energy, 27\% dark matter and 68\% of an unknown form of energy known as dark energy. Thus, dark matter constitutes 85\% of total mass, while dark energy plus dark matter constitute 95\% of total mass–energy content.