Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Has dark matter particle been found?

Both Jester and that Lubos tell about rumours that weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) has been detected in CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Detector).

The detectors of WIMPs are located deep underground to eliminate most of the cosmic rays and ideally leave only weakly interacting particles (electrons and gamma rays remain in the signal). Lubos had a link to a Youtube video about an audiovisual simulation of the events. The video translates the events to musical tones and light and the musical outcome is very "syncopic". Probably the jazzy character is the product of my own brain doing its best to build familiar patterns from the raw sensory data. The outcome is rather "melodic" due to the proper choice of notes chosen to represent data about position of event.

In standard scenario WIMP is identified as a dark matter particle.

  1. What comes in mind in TGD framework first is sneutrino (for TGD view about super-symmetry see this, this, this, and also this.). Probably the detection mechanism involves interactions with nucleons so that the detector is not able to detect sneutrinos however (see below). Sneutrino need not be dark in TGD sense (non-standard value of hbar) if its mass is so large that intermediate gauge bosons cannot decay to it. Otherwise darkness in the sense of non-standard value of hbar at space-time sheets at which the particle is stable is forced by the decay widths of weak gauge bosons, which does not allow other than known light particles as decay products of weak gauge bosons. Neutrino masses are predicted by the p-adic mass calculations apart from p-adic mass scale and the analog of CKM mixing. The mass of sneutrino would be half octave of the corresponding neutrino mass if SUSY is broken only via the selection of the p-adic mass scale. Unfortunately, neutrino masses (that is topological mixing matrix for neutrinos with different genera determining the counterpart of CKM mixing matrix) are not very well known.

  2. From the discussion in Lubos blog I learned that the most plausible candidate for the WIMP is neutralino, the lightest super-symmetric particle. It would be the counterpart of photon, Z0 boson, or Higgs or their mixture. In this posting I told that an old anomalous event scattering event giving indications for supersymmetry fixes via the p-adic length scale hypothesis the masses of some super-symmetric particles and it is interesting to see whether the prediction is correct! The masses of selectron, higgsino, and Z0-gluino are predicted to be 131 GeV, 45.6 GeV, and 91.2 GeV (Z0 mass) respectively so that higgsino with 45.6 GeV mass should be in question.

For a background see the chapter p-Adic Mass Calculations: New Physics of the book "p-Adic Length Scale Hypothesis And Dark Matter Hierarchy".

3 comments:

Dale Ritter said...

Supersymmetry and particle physics have come a long way. Interesting new images have been developed with picoyoctometric resolution to display particles which should be the supersymmetrons. Images of the h-bar magnetic waveparticle of ~175 picoyoctometers are available online at http://www.symmecon.com.

Anonymous said...

Hey, could you explain Feynman diagrams to me?

Matti Pitkänen said...

Dear Anonymous,


if you are a first year student who does not know what Feynman diagrams are, I would suggest that you either read some popular book about particle physics or start to study physics. Wikipedia is a good place to start from.

I sincerely hope that you are not one of those charming anonymous arrogants about whom I talked about in the earlier posting. If so, you are probably trying to demonstrate that I cannot even explain what Feynman diagram is (God Grief!)!!

If this is the case, I suggest that you use some time to learn how the notion of Feynman diagram generalizes in TGD framework and has interpretation in terms of space-time geometry and also how it relates to stringy diagrammatics. See for instance this.

You might be also interested to see how Feynman diagrammatics emerges in super-symmetric QFT limit of TGD and how this view about space-time super-symmetry differs from the standard one. See Does the QFT limit TGD have space-time supersymmetry.