Can dark matter be found on earth? New research says 'maybe'

One detector to do so uses these white detectors with a golden inside, looking like track lighting.Read: [A Japanese spacecraft sent back images of the rocky asteroid ‘Ryugu’ — and they’re stunning]Dark matter can also interact with the protons and neutrons in the nucleus of atoms, producing flashes of light (and other signals) called scattering. These postulated particles would interact with each other only through gravity, and the weak force that drives some forms of radioactive decay.WIMP particles seem to be compatible with the standard model — the set of equations and theories which helps predict the large-scale behavior of subatomic particles.However, the search for WIMP’s has, so far, proven fruitless, driving researchers to propose other means to account for the effects of dark matter.“The WIMP paradigm is very easy to build into the Standard Model, but we haven’t found it for a long time,” said Jeff Dror, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab.A new analysis of data already collected by particle accelerators could reveal the presence of dark matter, investigators suggest.“Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.” — Lawrence M. Researchers set their sights on two types of interactions between dark and regular matter.During the first of these, the neutral current process, particles of dark matter interact with the subatomic particles which make up the atoms in the instrument.“Searches for scattering look for a DM particle depositing its kinetic energy onto a target within the detector, typically a nucleus or an electron,” researchers report in an article published in the Physical Review Letters.The second class of these interactions are charged current studies, in which this recoil is accompanied by the release of an electron. Detecting these signals, if they occur, could be easier than other means of directly detecting the presence of dark matter, researchers suggest.The team at the center of this study is actively working with other researchers who may have already collected data needed to examine this idea.These techniques described in the study could open up new searches for dark matter particles having energies thousands of time greater than current technology allows.This article was originally published on The Cosmic Companion by James Maynard, founder and publisher of The Cosmic Companion.