Mathematical Model May Explain What Dark Matter Consists Of

Are Raklev Dark Matter

Are Raklev, the university’s leading theoretician in astroparticle physics, has launched a mathematical model that explains what dark matter may consist of. Credit: Yngve Vogt

University of Oslo’s leading theorist in astroparticle physics, Are Raklev, has launched a model that explains what dark matter may consist of and how one can discover the invisible particles experimentally.

The universe abounds with dark matter. Nobody knows what it consists of. UiO physicists have now launched a very hard mathematical explanation that could solve the mystery once and for all.

Astrophysicists have known for the last 80 years that most of the universe consists of an unknown, dark matter. The solution to the mystery may now be just around the corner.

“We are looking for a new member of our particle zoo in order to explain dark matter. We know that it is a very exotic beast. And we have found a plausible explanation,” reports Are Raklev, an associate professor in particle physics in the University of Oslo’s Department of Physics. He is the university’s leading theorist in astroparticle physics and has launched a model that explains what dark matter may consist of and how one can discover the invisible particles experimentally.

Even though dark matter is invisible, astrophysicists know it exists. Without this dark matter, it is impossible to explain how the visible things in the universe hang together.

Signs-of-Dark-Matter

The image shows all the gamma rays recorded by the Fermi-LAT space probe as a map of the entire universe. The red band through the middle of the image is radiation from our own galaxy. The center of the galaxy is almost at the center of the image. “It is here that a small surplus of gamma rays has been seen that one cannot immediately explain by the radiation one expects from ordinary matter. The observations may fit our dark matter models. This surplus of gamma rays is not visible to the eye, but can be found by a time-consuming analysis of the data,” says Are Raklev, who reminds us that the analysis is still a little uncertain. Credit: NASA

An 80-year fight

The world-famous, Swiss physicist Fritz Zwicky was speculating on what dark matter might be as early as the 1930s.

Astrophysicists have calculated that 80 percent of all the mass in the universe is dark, invisible matter. Thanks to gravity this dark matter clumps together as ordinary matter.

Dark matter can explain why stars move as they do. Dark matter may also explain the rotation speed of galaxies.

“Even though we can calculate how much dark matter there is in the universe, we still know little about what dark matter is. The particles in dark matter must either have a lot of mass, or there must be very many of them. Neutrinos meet all the requirements of dark matter. But there is one big difficulty. They have far too little mass.”

Are Raklev is now trying to prove that dark matter consists of gravitinos. This is a particle that has been unfairly treated for years.

And just what are gravitinos? Hold tight: gravitinos are the supersymmetric partner of gravitons.

Or, to be even more precise:

“The gravitino is the hypothetical, supersymmetric partner of the hypothetical particle graviton, so it is also impossible to predict a more hypothetical particle than this,” laughs Raklev, who writes on his web pages that he is looking for dark material both under his sofa and other places.

In order to dig deeper into why Raklev believes dark matter consists of gravitinos, and have any chance at all of understanding the theory behind gravitinos, Apollon has to take a couple of steps back:

Step 1: Supersymmetry

Physicists want to find out whether or not nature is supersymmetric. Supersymmetry means that there is a symmetry between matter and forces. For each type of electron and quark there is a corresponding heavy, supersymmetric partner. The supersymmetric particles were created in the instant after the Big Bang. If some of them have survived to today, they may be what dark matter is made of.

The supersymmetric partner of the gravitino is, as Apollon said, the graviton.

“A graviton is the particle we believe mediates gravitational force, just like a photon, the light particle, mediates electromagnetic force. While gravitons do not weigh anything at all, gravitinos may weigh a great deal. If nature is supersymmetric and gravitons exist, then gravitinos also exist. And vice versa. This is pure mathematics.”

But there is a small but. Physicists cannot demonstrate the relationship between gravitons and gravitinos before they have managed to unify all the forces of nature.

Step 2: The forces of nature

One of the biggest things physicists long to do is to unify all the forces of nature in a single theory. In the middle of the last century, physicists discovered that electricity and magnetism were part of the same force of nature. This force has since been called electromagnetism. Two of the other forces of nature are the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. The weak nuclear force can be seen in, among things, radioactivity. The strong nuclear force is ten billion times as strong and binds together neutrons and protons.

In the 1970s, electromagnetism was unified with the strong and weak nuclear forces in what physicists call the standard model.

The fourth force of nature is gravity. Even though it is unbelievably painful to fall downstairs, gravity is the weakest of the four forces of nature.

The problem is that physicists have not yet been able to unify gravity with the three other forces of nature. The day physicists gain a unified understanding of all four forces of nature, they will gain a unique understanding of the world. This will make it possible to describe all imaginable interactions between all possible particles in nature. Physicists call this the ToE Theory (Theory of Everything).

“In order to unify gravitational force with the other three forces of nature we have to understand gravity as quantum theory. This means we need a theory in which the particle graviton is included in the atomic nucleus.”

Researchers are now looking for signs of both supersymmetry and the ToE Theory. Discovering the graviton would be an enormous step in this direction.

Reveals dark matter

As the reader may have understood, it is very difficult to research dark matter. This is because dark matter has no electromagnetic relationships to terrestrial particles at all. One example of dark matter is the aforementioned neutrino. Unfortunately, neutrinos make up only an imperceptibly tiny part of dark matter.

Even though it has not been possible to observe dark matter, several billion neutrinos race through your body every second. However, their speed is somewhat limited. The particles move just as slowly as the speed the solar system moves around the galaxy. In other words, a mere 400 kilometers a second.

“When there are no electromagnetic relationships with visible particles, the particles can pass right through us without any measuring instruments detecting them. This is where supersymmetry comes in. If supersymmetry is right, physicists can explain why there is dark matter in the universe. That is what is fun about my job,” laughs Raklev.

He is now asserting that dark matter mostly consists of gravitinos.

“Supersymmetry simplifies everything. If the ToE Theory exists, in other words, if it is possible to unify the four forces of nature, gravitinos must exist.”

The gravitinos were formed right after the Big Bang.

“A short time after the Big Bang we had a soup of particles that collided. Gluons, which are the force-bearing particles in the strong nuclear force, collided with other gluons and emitted gravitinos. Many gravitinos were formed after the Big Bang, while the universe was still plasma. So we have an explanation of why gravitinos exist.”

Changed life span

Physicists have up to now viewed gravitinos as a problem. They have believed that the theory of supersymmetry does not work because there are too many gravitinos.

“Physicists have therefore strived to eliminate gravitinos from their models. We, on the other hand, have found a new explanation that unifies the supersymmetry model with dark matter that consists of gravitinos. If dark matter is not stable, but just very long lived, it is possible to explain how dark matter consists of gravitinos.”

In the old models, dark matter was always everlasting. This meant that gravitinos were a bothersome part of the supersymmetry model. In Raklev’s new model, their life span is no longer endless. Nonetheless, the average life span of gravitinos is very long and actually longer than the life span of the universe.

However, there is a big difference between an unending life span and a life span of more than 15 billion years. With limited a life span, gravitinos must be converted into other particles. It is precisely this conversion effect that can be measured. And the conversion explains the model.

“We believe that almost all dark matter is gravitinos. The explanation lies in very hard mathematics. We are developing special models that calculate the consequences of these theories and we predict how the particles can be observed in experiments.”

The measurements are underway

Researchers are now trying to test this experimentally and explain why these new particles have not yet been seen in the CERN experiments in Geneva in Switzerland.

“On the other hand, it should theoretically possible to observe them from a space probe.”

The simplest way of observing gravitinos could be studying what happens if two particles collide out in the universe and are converted into other particles such as photons or antimatter.

Even though the collisions occur very rarely, there is still so much dark matter in the universe that a significant number of photons should be able to be produced.

The big problem is that gravitinos do not collide.

“At least it happens so rarely that we could never hope to observe it.”

Nonetheless, there is hope.

“Luckily for us, gravitinos are not one hundred percent stable. They are converted into something else at some point. We can predict what the signal looks like after gravitinos have been converted. The conversion will send out a small electromagnetic wave. This is also called a gamma ray.”

NASA’s Fermi-LAT space probe is currently measuring gamma rays. A number of research groups are now analyzing the data.

“So far we have only seen noise. But one of the research groups claims they have observed a small, suspicious surplus of gamma rays from the center of our galaxy. Their observations may fit our models,” says the man behind the very difficult mathematical model for dark matter, associate professor in theoretical particle physics, Are Raklev.

7 Comments on "Mathematical Model May Explain What Dark Matter Consists Of"

  1. Madanagopal.V.C | April 5, 2013 at 6:35 am | Reply

    The Dark Matter particles being exotic in nature and assuming that they are super-symmetry particles, like gravitino, they attract each other to clump together. They are Bosonic in nature. Just like electric and magnetic force which are both repulsive and attractive in two vectorial directions , even for gravity there should be a gravitational repulsion. This happens with super-symmetry particles and ordinary matter particles. We know that Dark Matter drives away big galaxies in fantastic speed comparable to the velocity of light which gives an explanation for the ballooning and expansion of our Universe in a parabolic form since Big bang. Here we observe a gravitational repulsion between Dark Matter and Light Matter worlds. Of course, gravitational lensing effect of light from distant galaxies by Dark Matter can also be explained by Gravitational repulsion between Dark Matter and Light Photons. The article suggests that free existing gluons in the primordial soup of Universe after Big Bang could have clumped together to form the fabric of Dark Matter initially which degenerated later on. Gluons clump in triple as Red , Green and Blue color gluons in ordinary matter binding quarks. Double clumping leaves them as unstable as in mesons. This is in contrast to bipolar electric charges. So the candidates for Dark Matter could be gluons or gravitinos as suggested excluding electrons or photons. Higgs Boson which accounts for the mass also is a candidate to study, like neutrinos. But they may not be single unit gluon or gravitino and the hierarchy would be multiple in structure. Thus let us throw some light on Dark Matter and search for it. Thank You.

  2. Sarma Katemillion | December 16, 2016 at 10:47 pm | Reply

    Dark matter has a super symmetry relationship with pure consciousness. If you contemplate pure consciousness as the ascending result of plasma, the transmutation leads to a matterless quantum plane. So the supersymetry of that is the total loss of frequency or consciousness. It is a magnetic version of the quantum plane with the highest gravitational force in the universe. It has zero resistance or duality with projection, making it invisible in a magnetic force field. The frequency of dark matter is negative. Consciousness is a point that transforms input to output. Dark matter is a point that transforms output to input. The big bang could have been result of the centrifugal force created by these two opposing forces transferring information between the two. Causing a fragmentation of the consciousness that initiated a descent in frequency that resulted in plasma. On the other hand,the opposing consciousness/dark matter fragmented as well, and gained frequency that resulted in dark energy. The plasma and the dark energy being symmetrical forces, are what started the cycle and spiral of the universe. We are observing the battle of magnetic and electrical consciousnesses. The symmetry is resulting in fragmentation. The fragmentation is resulting in a mechanism related to entrophy with frequency instead of heat. The dark matter is basically piggybacking energy off the consciousness, perhaps to project the consciousness like a sling shot. Consciousness travels in the vehicle of vibration. Or this whole shenanigan is a dieing quantum plane. This is my theory of everything.

  3. Wardell J Lindsay | June 27, 2017 at 3:16 pm | Reply

    Dark Matter does no exist. Gravity is not the only mover. Electromagnetic does matter also, magnets. over-gravity motion is due to electromagnetism.

    Lorentz force F=e[c,V][,B]= [, ecB + eVxB] the rotation force is
    eVxB=VxP/r thus P=eBr=euI the electrons flow eV enters the galaxy aving B=uI/r magnetic field. mV=euI sgives
    V=(e/m)uI =176G1.25u I= 220km/sA I. If I=1Amp the suns velocity is 220km/s!
    Te electron flow force accelerates he runs to the electron flow. This is an Homopolar motor driven by interstellar electron flow. The current I is the rotating charged suns.There must be at least 250 suns like ours to produce 1 Amp for B=uI to produce the Lorentz force F=eVxB. f=ecB is a force at the center of the B field “Black Hole”.

    Suns are positive charged as electrons are boiled off leaving protons.

    The Universe is four dimensional Quaternion, [scalar, Vector]

    The proper Modification of Newton Dynamics is
    W = [c,V][,P] = [-vp,cP] = [-mGM/r, cP] were the vector energy is cP, the “Dark Energy”. Notice that velocity is a Quaternion with [c,V] and te scalat is te speed of light!
    Lorentz force uses the Quaternion velocity
    Lorentz = e[c,V][,B] = e[-V.B, cB + VxB] = e[-V.B, E + VxB]

  4. Hossein Akhtar Mohagheghi | September 20, 2019 at 7:33 am | Reply

    theory of motion gravity:
    This theory states that if a very massive disk is spinning at low speed in space, the state of gravity imbalance in the direction and opposite to the direction of its rotation, resulting in its speed of rotation increases without the need for any other external energy.
    The equation in this theory, in addition to the high speed of rotation of black holes, can explain many other astronomical questions with full accuracy.
    The motion gravity Theory this is similar to two cars that move at a constant distance, and in an instant, the front wheel carts into a hole and throws water droplets into the air, which is here if the speed of both cars is low Droplets will hit the rear of the car a bit, but if the speed of two cars is too high, more drops of water will hit the rear car.

  5. … it consist from particle of nothing…

  6. … it might share some influence with our universe, but other way it could vibrate in some different dimensions, …
    … there was no proof of small ones lately, but some chance to it. I think that this stuff is way more important than some people figure it out (//Virtual_particle)…

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