dark matter – Quanta Magazine

What Could Explain the Gallium Anomaly?

Jonathan O'Callaghan — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 13:30:54 +0000

Deep in the Caucasus Mountains, on the border between Russia and Georgia, an unusual experiment is taking place. In an underground lab shielded by a mountain of rock, highly radioactive material sits inside a vat of liquid gallium, blasting out particles called neutrinos that break the gallium down into atoms of germanium. The goal is to resolve a little-known mystery of physics: the gallium...

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He Seeks Mystery Magnetic Fields With His Quantum Compass

Charlie Wood — Fri, 17 May 2024 14:03:34 +0000

Atomic physicists “are jacks of all trades,” according to Alex Sushkov. “You have to have the idea, design the experiment, build the experiment, run the experiment, fix everything, take data, analyze data, write up the paper. You do everything,” and that “suits my personality.” In his lab at Boston University, the Russian-born Australian is supercharging a 50-year-old tool for new purposes.

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Dogged Dark Matter Hunters Find New Hiding Places to Check

Lyndie Chiou — Tue, 07 May 2024 14:37:01 +0000

The end is brutal for electrons hurtling at 99.9999999% of the speed of light through SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s two-mile-long beam pipe: a final slam into End Station A. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, such collisions broke apart protons and neutrons to reveal the elementary particles that make them up. The discovery won the experiment’s leader a Nobel Prize. “End Station A is this...

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What Is the Nature of Time?

Steven Strogatz — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 14:00:20 +0000

Time seems linear to us: We remember the past, experience the present and predict the future, moving consecutively from one moment to the next. But why is it that way, and could time ultimately be a kind of illusion? In this episode, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek speaks with host Steven Strogatz about the many “arrows” of time and why most of them seem irreversible...

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In a ‘Dark Dimension,’ Physicists Search for the Universe’s Missing Matter

Steve Nadis — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 15:40:30 +0000

When it comes to understanding the fabric of the universe, most of what scientists think exists is consigned to a dark, murky domain. Ordinary matter, the stuff we can see and touch, accounts for just 5% of the cosmos. The rest, cosmologists say, is dark energy and dark matter, mysterious substances that are labeled “dark” partly to reflect our ignorance about their true nature.

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