The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on Tuesday said it is planning a new experiment to look for particles associated with dark matter, which is believed to make up about 27 percent of the universe.
CERN, which is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — a giant lab in a 27km tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border — said that the new experiment is “designed to look for light and weakly interacting particles.”
Scientists say that so-called ordinary matter — which includes stars, gases, dust, planets and everything on them — accounts for only 5 percent of the universe.
However, dark matter and dark energy account for the rest, and scientists have yet to directly observe either.
Invisible to telescopes, dark matter is a mysterious substance, which is perceived through its gravitational pull on other objects in the cosmos.
“Some of these sought-after particles are associated with dark matter,” CERN said in a statement.
Back in 2010, the LHC began smashing high-energy protons into each other at velocities near the speed of light. These collisions generate new particles, giving physicists an unprecedented look at the laws of nature in the hope of better understanding the universe.
However, the LHC’s four main detectors are not suited for picking up evidence of such light and weakly interacting particles associated with dark matter.
“They may travel hundreds of meters without interacting with any material before transforming into known and detectable particles, such as electrons and positrons. The exotic particles would escape the existing detectors along the current beam lines and remain undetected,” CERN said.
To address the problem, CERN has developed a new instrument known as FASER, which can perform highly sensitive searches and is able to spot such particles.
“Although the protons in the particle beams will be bent by magnets around the LHC, the light, very weakly interacting particles will continue along a straight line and their ‘decay products’ can be spotted by FASER,” it said.
The aim is to search for hypothesized particles, including so-called dark photons and neutralinos, which are also associated with dark matter, with the experiment expected to start running between 2021 and 2023.
In 2012, the LHC was used to prove the existence of the Higgs Boson — dubbed the God particle — which allowed scientists to make great progress in understanding how particles acquire mass.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
DEMONSTRATIONS: A protester said although she would normally sit back and wait for the next election, she cannot do it this time, adding that ‘we’ve lost too much already’ Thousands of protesters rallied on Saturday in New York, Washington and other cities across the US for a second major round of demonstrations against US President Donald Trump and his hard-line policies. In New York, people gathered outside the city’s main library carrying signs targeting the US president with slogans such as: “No Kings in America” and “Resist Tyranny.” Many took aim at Trump’s deportations of undocumented migrants, chanting: “No ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], no fear, immigrants are welcome here.” In Washington, protesters voiced concern that Trump was threatening long-respected constitutional norms, including the right to due process. The
RSS