Dark matter is all around us. Although no one has ever seen it, and no one knows exactly what it is, undeniable physical calculations indicate that approximately 27 percent of the universe is composed of dark matter. Only five percent is accounted for by normal matter, of which the objects familiar to us consist, from a tiny ant to giant galaxies.
For decades, researchers have been trying to detect this invisible dark matter. Devices of various types were built on Earth and launched into space with the aim of detecting the particles that are supposed to be dark matter; In addition, physicists have repeatedly collided elementary particles of normal matter in giant particle accelerators, trying to create a particle of dark matter from them, but so far all these attempts have been unsuccessful.
“Maybe this is because we are looking at dark matter from the wrong 'angle' that we should be,” says Martin Slot, associate professor at the Center for Cosmology and Phenomenology of Particle Physics at the University of Southern Denmark and one of the authors of the new model of dark energy.
For many decades, physicists have been developing the theory that dark matter is made up of light particles that interact weakly with normal matter. This means that such particles can be produced in colliders as a result of collisions of particles of normal matter. According to this theory, dark matter particles called weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs) were formed in unimaginably large quantities shortly after the birth of the universe, which took place 13.7 billion years ago.
“However, since no trace of a WIMP particle has been detected in any experiment so far, we suggest looking for a heavier 'dark' particle that only participates in gravitational interaction and therefore cannot be detected directly,” says Martin Slot.
Slot and his colleagues call such a PIDM particle (Planckian Interacting Dark Matter).
"The formation of such particles is possible at extremely high temperatures, and these are the temperatures that were maintained in the early universe, immediately after the Big Bang."
The study was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
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