We are able to use bizarre sugar within the seek for darkish matter

Scientists have confected a brand new solution to seek for darkish matter utilizing large crystals of sucrose, or desk sugar – although, thus far, they’ve discovered solely the bittersweet style of an absence of outcomes.

We consider that darkish matter exists based mostly on the unusual gravitational pull it seems to exert on galaxies, however regardless of many years trying to find attainable darkish matter particles, scientists have discovered nothing. Many of those searches appeared for weakly interacting huge particles (WIMPs), which have been lengthy regarded as among the many most promising darkish matter candidates. However even essentially the most delicate searches got here up empty handed.

Most WIMP detectors search for flashes of sunshine {that a} passing darkish matter particle would possibly produce when it interacts with common matter, however this assume the particles are sufficiently massive, round 2 to 10,000 occasions the mass of a proton. That is what would clarify darkish matter’s galactic results most clearly, however additionally it is attainable that WIMPs are lighter, despite the fact that this matches extra awkwardly with the speculation.

Now, Federica Petricca on the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany, and her colleagues have looked for these lighter WIMPs utilizing a detector produced from sugar crystals cooled to excessive temperatures.

Very gentle WIMPs ought to work together most clearly with very gentle atoms, like hydrogen, however utilizing pure hydrogen as a detector is tough due to its low density, lowering the possibilities of an interplay. Sucrose, nonetheless, comprises 22 hydrogen atoms on every molecule, at a far larger density than pure hydrogen.

Petricca and her staff first grew crystals of sucrose from a concentrated sugar answer over a interval of every week, earlier than decreasing the temperature of the crystals to seven thousandths of a level above absolute zero. They then watched for attainable darkish matter interactions by on the lookout for tiny will increase in warmth, utilizing an ultrasensitive thermometer, and flashes of sunshine, utilizing a photon sensor.

The researchers ran their experiment for 19 hours and, whereas the sugar crystals did gentle up at ranges in line with bigger particles, they didn’t measure any weaker detections that would have been produced by a WIMP.

The sugar crystals have been set as much as search for attainable darkish matter interactions with exceptional sensitivity, says Carlos Blanco at Pennsylvania State College, and so they may permit researchers to see extraordinarily small recoils from gentle WIMPs. Nonetheless, it isn’t clear whether or not the experiment is ready to successfully rule out different attainable sources lighting up the crystals, such because the radioactive carbon-14 that’s generally discovered in lots of sugars.

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