Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Standard views about cosmic rays and galactic dark matter in difficulties




The morning walk in web resulted in two interesting news. Both told about experimental findings which challenge existing theories. The first theory assumes that highly energetic cosmic rays get their energy in ultra strong magnetic fields. Second theory states what galactic dark matter consists of wimps or some other particles with exotic name surrounding galaxy as a spherical or nearly spherical halo.

Standard view about very high energy cosmic rays is in difficulties


The latest news is that cosmic ray models which assume that cosmic rays receive their enormous energies (up to 109 GeV = 106 TeV at least) by acceleration in gigantic magnetic fields are in difficulties. The high energy protons resulting in this manner should be accompanied by neutrinos. Too few neutrinos are detected.

TGD based explanation for ultra-high cosmic ray energies introduced already around 1995 (see "Cosmic rays and Mersenne primes" here) would be that the energies are due to the fact that they are decay products of scaled up copies of hadron physics assignable to Mersenne primes Mk= 2k-1 with k=89 with mass scale of .5 TeV (scaled up proton mass) that LHC is painfully trying to avoid to discover;-), k=61 with mass scale of 8×103 TeV, k=31 with mass scale 2.6×108 TeV,... The dynamics is expected to be so fast that the cosmic rays arriving here are nucleons or gamma rays, which interact with atmosphere and can create hadrons of the scaled up versions of the ordinary hadron physics. Simple estimates show that most events would be due to M89 hadrons and highest energy cosmic rays above GKZ bound having energy about 1011 GeV could create M61 hadrons.


In the previous posting I told about evidence by Fermi for gamma ray pairs which could result in annihilations of particles with 130 GeV to two gamma rays. A possible TGD based interpretation of particles could is as charged counterparts of M89 pions predicted to have this mass by naive scaling argument. Neutral M89 pion would be just the Higgs candidate with mass 125 GeV, which does not seem to behave like a descent Higgs should behave despite the fact that theoreticians strongly encourage it to keep at least the name "Higgs" and title "God particle". Also an "octave" of M89 neutral pion predicted to be possible by p-adic length scale hypothesis can be considered as an explanation but now the mass would be 260 GeV and 10 GeV larger than what experimental finding suggests. These particles could be dark in TGD sense (having Planck constant equal to a multiple of its standard value) but I am not aware of any constraint forcing this.


Standard view about dark matter is in difficulties


Also the standard view about galactic dark matter is in difficulties. The assumption is that galactic dark matter forms a spherical halo around the galaxy: with a suitable distribution this would explain constant velocity distribution of distant stars. Sometime ago NASA reported that Fermi telescope does not find support for dark matter in this sense in small faint galaxies that orbit our own.

Another blow against standard view came now. A team using the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory, along with other telescopes, has mapped the motions of more than 400 stars up to 13,000 light-years from the Sun. Also in this case the signature would have been the gravitational effects of dark matter. No evidence for dark matter has been found in this volume. The results will be published in an article entitled "Kinematical and chemical vertical structure of the Galactic thick disk II. A lack of dark matter in the solar neighborhood," by Moni-Bidin et al. to appear in The Astrophysical Journal.

Also these findings support the TGD based model for galactic dark matter (to be carefully distinguished from dark matter as large hbar phases appearing in much smaller amounts and essential for life in TGD inspired quantum biology). TGD based model for the galactic dark matter postulates that the dominating contribution is along long magnetic flux tubes resulting from these during cosmic expansion and containing galaxies around them like pearls in a necklace.

The distribution of dark matter would be concentrated around this string rather than forming a spherical halo around galaxy. This would give rise to a gravitational acceleration behaving like 1/ρ , where ρ is transversal distance from the string, explaining constant velocity spectrum for distant stars. The killer prediction is that galaxies could move along the string direction freely. Large scale motions difficult to understand in standard cosmology has been indeed observed. It has been also known for a long time that galaxies tend to concentrate on linear structures

Sad to say, that again there is impenetrable communication barrier involved. People calling themselves professionals read only articles published in so called respected journals. If the article is by a theoretician he must be a name. Lubos tells about the war between experimenters who find experimental evidence for the existence of something which they interpret as dark matter and other experimenters who find evidence for its absence. Situation would become much more interesting if some-one would be ready to ask whether something in the basic thinking might be wrong in this kind of situation! Physics cannot be a war! In more peaceful circumstances, fresh views and new ideas could flourish. One example of a fresh view is that in TGD Universe the dark matter candidates claimed by DAMA could be created in atmospheric collisions of cosmic rays from the direction of galactic center rather than coming from the galactic center (see this)!

It is ironic that at the period when electronic communications have transformed the world to a village, the deepest problems in modern physics seem to be due to the impossibility to communicate! Professional ego is an extremely effective cognitive immune system!

4 comments:

Ulla said...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120418111923.htm

L. Edgar Otto said...

Matti,

It is most interesting we have converged to similar thoughts as in my (long posts lately) that physics in any of its struggles and debates is not a war between enemies if we really want things unified or explained.

I wonder if in some deep sense my thoughts on the intrinsic spin or motion of the equator (of earth and cosmos) a directionality is like your take on such wormhole directionality in this post. Still, it is not clear to me that given a wide view at least in theory that from one viewpoint we do reaffirm the standard theory but with ideas far beyond the usual fare. Odd Lubos speaks of Lorentz as well as Einstein as if he can see many sides of an issue as we perhaps wage war in the intuitions of our own mind.

I would like your take on the Majorana ideas from the TGD viewpoint as I have looked into it from my quasic view. Yeah, I have not seen the video but if the theoretician sees the need for at least a three fold viewpoint that could be right on but a little late from my stance- sort of CPT like logic issues. (see Lubos for the video today).

Now, as far as cosmic rays I have always had such distinctions since would you believe 1963 ? Now if atoms do not exist as in that video of chasing infinity in the building of our machines- what does that leave? String theory?

ThePeSla

matpitka@luukku.com said...

Majorana spinors are out of question in TGD framework. They would require non-conservation of baryon and lepton number and the whole point is that TGD provides natural explanation for the separate conservation of B and L. All experiments trying to find decays of proton have failed and both GUTs and string based unifications have to work hardly to fine tune proton lifetime to be long enough. That colleagues after these 40 years are still stubbornly sticking to theories in which B is not conserved is an impressive demonstrations about miserable state of theoretical physics.

LHC is now teaching to the stubborn theorists that standard SUSY relying on Majorana property is completely wrong. TGD provides a different version of SUSY in which right handed neutrino- the mystery particle of standard model plays a key role. The most amazing outcome - this is still speculation - could be that superpartners have same mass scale as ordinary particles.


I was a little bit irritated when condensed matter hypers talk about massless electrons moving with reduced light velocity without making clear that they mean totally different from what innocent layman might think. Or about observation of Majorana electrons in condensed matter without stating clearly that these have nothing to do with Majorana fermion in fundamental sense. Latest similar totally misleading hype was hype about electrons splitting into spinons and orbitons: it would be easy to add a clarifying comment but since the hype would not sound so sexy anymore this was not done and laymen has freedom to take this talk literally.

I do not understand what non-existence of atoms is intended to mean. In any case, I am not worried about existence of atoms;-).

Montag said...

Thank you for your clarity.