Dark matter is an elusive substance that physicists all over the world are hunting for. A group of researchers from the University of Nevada did interesting work and tried to calculate a mysterious substance using an atomic clock.
Dark matter makes up 85% of all matter in the universe, but despite the plethora of astrophysical evidence pointing to its existence, detecting dark matter has so far been nearly impossible. As a consequence, science still knows very little about the nature and properties of this phenomenon. But recently, professors at the University of Nevada (UNR) have done extensive research and have significantly narrowed down the areas of "hunting" for the elusive substance.
In theory, there are several formulas for searching for dark matter, but the team of Jeff Blevitt and Andrei Derevyanko of UNR suspects that it arises from quantum fields during the formation of macroscopic objects. The idea is that dark matter "fuses" into bubbles or stripes that travel through the solar system and beyond. To confirm this, scientists decided to look for any evidence that such objects occur on the path of the Earth.
Searching for dark matter with an atomic clock
Apparently, dark matter is inhomogeneous, and its ultra-light constituents can cause changes in the fundamental laws of the surrounding world - for example, change the mass of quarks, electrons and electric charges. Such shifts in natural constants can change the levels of atomic energy that the researchers were going to measure using an atomic clock, in this case acting as a very convenient tool.
In an interview with the Nevada Today news agency, Derevianko compared this process to "a wall that moves through the clock network and causes a series of atomic clock glitches that propagate along the GPS at galactic speed." The bottom line is that when a cluster of dark matter passes through the matter we are familiar with, it seems to "pull" the masses of particles and forces that provide interaction between particles. It is worth considering that this phenomenon is very, very weak, otherwise inquisitive physicists would have discovered such distortions long ago. In this case, it is supersensitive devices like atomic clocks that can shed some light on such subtle processes.
Scheme according to which clusters of dark matter can intersect with the Earth
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A "halo" of dark matter is a hypothetical part of the galaxy, surrounding its disk and even extending far beyond its limits. If the Milky Way has a dark matter halo, then the Earth moves through it at a speed of 300 km / s, or 1/1000 the speed of light. However, when scientists examined the vast archive of data collected by their predecessors, they found no evidence of the interaction of fragments of dark matter with ordinary matter.
Conclusion
However, research into detecting dark matter is not only about achieving individual results, but also about formulating a strategy that will avoid mistakes in the future and set science on the right path. Scientists themselves are confident that modern equipment is simply not sensitive enough to detect the smallest atomic shifts, but in the future a similar experiment on more advanced devices will be crowned with success.
Vasily Makarov