dark matter

From Live Science, April 29, 2020: One of the deepest mysteries in physics could be explained by a long-since vanished form of dark matter. Fermilab scientist Dan Hooper is one of the authors of the new result. If an ancient form of dark matter decayed out of existence, that loss would have decreased the mass of the universe, which would have led to less gravity holding the universe together, which would have affected the speed at which the universe expands — helping explain the disagreement between measurements of the universe’s expansion.

From Physics World, March 24, 2020: Scientists using the first year of data from the Dark Energy Survey, which is led by Fermilab, establish that there is a correlation between the positions of gravitational lenses — deduced from the stretching of distant galaxies — and gamma-ray photons. A data comparison from gravitational lensing and gamma-ray observations reveals that regions of the sky with greater concentrations of matter emit more gamma rays.

From Event Horizon podcast, March 19, 2020: Fermilab scientist James Annis and John Michael Godier discuss neutrinos, dark energy, dark matter and upcoming cosmological surveys in this 30-minute interview.

From Gizmodo, Feb. 19, 2020: Sensor limits have driven one dark matter-hunting team to build a dark matter detector from the same guts as a quantum computer. Their device under construction at Fermilab solidifies extreme sensing as one of present-day quantum technology’s best real-world applications.

From Cold Facts, Feb. 13, 2020: The Cryogenic Society of America picks up Fermilab’s story on the new SuperCDMS dilution refrigerator at SNOLAB near Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.

There are a lot of things scientists don’t know about dark matter: Can we catch it in a detector? Can we make it in a lab? What kinds of particles is it made of? Is it made of more than one kind of particle? Is it even made of particles at all? Still, although scientists have yet to find the spooky stuff, they aren’t completely in the dark.

From UChicago News, Feb. 6, 2020: Fermilab and University of Chicago scientist Brad Benson and colleagues use a different method to calculate the masses of distant galaxies: the polarization, or orientation, of the light left over from the moments after the Big Bang. In doing so, they demonstrate how to “weigh” galaxy clusters using light from the earliest moments of the universe — a new method that could help shed light on dark matter, dark energy and other mysteries of the cosmos.

As technology improves, scientists discover new ways to search for theorized dark matter particles called axions. Four decades after they were first theorized, axions are enjoying a moment in the sun, and may even be on the verge of detection, poised to solve two major problems in physics at once.

From Scientific American, February 2020: Collaborators from eight institutions have come together to turn a mine shaft at Fermilab into the world’s largest atom interferometer — MAGIS-100. The researchers plan to assemble the instrument in 2021 and start harnessing lasers to expand submicroscopic strontium atoms into macroscale “atom waves” soon after. Fermilab scientist Rob Plunkett comments on the mind-boggling experiment.

From SLAC, Jan. 13, 2020: Matching up maps of matter and light from the Dark Energy Survey, hosted at Fermilab, and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope may help astrophysicists understand what causes a faint cosmic gamma-ray glow.