“I don't think anybody in the field really believes that a specific candidate for dark matter is correct,” says David Morrissey, who researches antimatter/matter asymmetry at Canada’s particle accelerator centre, TRIUMF. Not everyone believes that axions are the best candidate for dark matter, however, but the potential for a specific dark matter theory to explain other mysteries in physics, like antimatter/matter asymmetry, has a large part to play in which theory of dark matter scientists choose to explore. "For the first time, we have explicitly searched for an interaction between dark matter and antimatter, and though we did not find a difference, we set a new upper limit for the potential interaction between dark matter and antimatter," Smorra said in a statement. In this experiment, the axion effect on the antiproton was not observed, but Christian Smorra, lead author of the study and researcher at Riken Fundamental Symmetries Laboratory, said the experiment nonetheless made progress in determining what dark matter-antimatter interactions might look like. They measured a property of the antiproton which should be constant, postulating that observed fluctuations could be the result of dark matter axions. Using a specially designed device, researchers trapped a single antiproton (the antiparticle of the proton) and kept it isolated to avoid annihilation through interacting with a photon. Their findings were reported in a paper published in Nature. To initially test this theory, collaborators from the international BASE project ( Baryon Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment) designed an experiment to detect interactions between antimatter and a hypothetical axion particle, which is one of many proposed candidates for what dark matter is made of. Hypothetically, if dark matter interacts differently with matter and antimatter, it could produce the imbalance between the two, creating the right conditions for matter to exist without being annihilated by antimatter. Observations of unexpected effects of gravity imply there is far more matter in the universe than the matter we can see. The universe would never have formed.įor the first time, an experiment led by the Fundamental Symmetries Laboratory at Japanese research institution Riken has explored whether dark matter, itself a mystery in cosmology, could be the cause of the dominance of matter over antimatter.ĭark matter is a form of mass and energy that doesn’t interact with light, making it undetectable in astronomical observations. If this had happened-as would be the expected result, assuming symmetry in the universe-opposing matter and antimatter would have been cancelled out, leaving nothing at all. Physicists currently don’t understand why, at the origin of the universe or just after, matter and antimatter were seemingly not produced in equal quantities. In a new experiment, scientists probed a theory that suggests a weird interaction between two of the biggest mysteries in physics could be why our universe exists in the first place.Īntimatter and dark matter are two of modern science's biggest mysteries, and now scientists are probing whether they could be linked in order to explain why and how our universe exists at all.
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