“It's more a matter of looking for the candidates that seem to have the best theoretical motivation.”Īxions were originally proposed to explain a different asymmetry problem in particle physics, and later also suggested as a potential candidate for dark matter. “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. 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 on Wednesday 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.
Dark matter is a form of mass and energy that doesn’t interact with light, making it undetectable in astronomical observations.
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