After decades of searching and multiple no-shows, it is crunch time for a leading theory of what comprises dark matter, the mysterious stuff thought to make up around 85% of the Universe’s matter.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, is scheduled to restart in March after a major upgrade. It is widely seen as the last chance in a generation to create — and thus confirm — theoretical particles known as WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. A super-sensitive ‘direct-detection’ experiment, which is designed to catch naturally occurring WIMPs streaming from the heavens, is also due to start this year.
At the same time, the failure so far to glimpse WIMPs at either the LHC or through direct-detection experiments, combined with surprise signals from others, is fuelling suggestions that dark matter is made of something else. A range of alternatives that were previously considered underdog candidates now look “less exotic”, says Kevork Abazajian, a theorist who studies particle cosmology at the University of California, Irvine.
Jack Sarfatti adds "My theory predicts no WIMPS. Instead dark matter is a quantum vacuum effect from virtual fermion-antifermion pairs that gravitationally clump at shorter scales whilst virtual bosons anti-clump spreading out to larger scales as observed. This is simple physics, Lorentz invariance, equivalence principle, spin-statistics connection."
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