Long ago, physicists identified and categorized the components of the visible universe. Until recently, 16 particles made up everything in the world known to us. But now, thanks to the efforts of physicists at CERN with the Large Hadron Collider, we have added another particle, the Higgs boson, to the Standard Model of physics. Yet there is a whole hidden - or dark - aspect of physics and our natural world that the Standard Model cannot explain even in the presence of the Higgs boson. Quite frankly, all visible matter is not enough to explain the behavior of the universe that we observe.
A new study by researchers at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in South Korea suggests that we have found a way to bridge the gap between the visible world and the dark sector of physics: portals.
Portal to the dark sector
When you hear anything about portals, you’re probably thinking of some sci-fi adventure or pie-is-lies debate, but we are not talking about these portals right now. Our portals must exist in a quantum world, the scale of which is inconceivably small.
These portals have been called "dark axion portals," based on two hypothetical dark sector particles that scientists have already proposed - the axion and the dark photon. An axion is a theoretical particle that is considered very light, much lighter than an electron, which, according to theoretical physicists, could solve some of the mathematical problems with the Standard Model. Dark photons are theoretically similar to the photons that make up visible light, except that they are not easy to interact with or detect.
The connection between visible and "dark" particles must be provided by heavy quarks (one of the quantum particles of the Standard Model), which also have a dark charge. With such a charge, a quark could connect to dark photons, bridging the gap between the two "worlds."
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"The Dark Axion Portal offers the first meaningful link between two areas of physics that have been studied separately: it connects the dots," lead researcher Lee Hye-sung said in a press release from IBS. "This will allow us to reinterpret previous data and possibly make a breakthrough in the search for axions and dark photons."
Now a group of scientists is developing experiments that will decipher these portals, once and for all, if axions and dark photons really exist. We may never know everything there is to know about the universe, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't even try.
ILYA KHEL
