Is the Large Hadron Collider secretly creating dark matter in its particle jets?

The ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider.

The ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider.

(Image credit: CERN/Claudia Marcelloni/Max Brice)

A new hunt for dark matter has come up empty handed, but the effort produced important limits that will help future experiments narrow the hunt for this elusive substance.

Most astronomers believe that dark matter accounts for 85 percent of all mass in the universe, and its existence would explain the apparent extra gravity detectable around galaxies and within huge galaxy clusters. However, no one has been able to identify what dark matter is made of.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, has failed to turn up evidence for the existence of WIMPs. Thus, theorists are having to scramble to find alternative theories of what dark matter could be. “WIMPs is one class of particles that are hypothesized to explain dark matter as they do not absorb or emit light and don’t interact strongly with other particles,” stated Deepak Kar, a professor of physics of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Some alternative models of dark matter posit that, rather than being weakly interacting, dark matter could actually interact strongly with some particles in the Standard Model.

Now, Kar and his former student, Sukanya Sinha who is now at the University of Manchester in the U.K., have developed a new way of searching for these potential dark quarks and dark gluons in high-energy collisions between protons that take place within the LHC. When protons come together at almost the speed of light inside the LHC, they are smashed apart into their component quarks and gluons that swiftly decay to produce a shower of short-lived subatomic particles.

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