Thursday, October 16, 2014

Has dark matter particle been observed?

Lubos tells about claim that axions coming from Sun and transformed in Earth's magnetic field to X rays in keV range have been observed. The mass of the axion - to be distinguished from its much higher energy - would be few microeVs, which is rather small and corresponds to a p-adic length scale L(k=207) of about .5 meters. The next prime k=211 would give p-adic scale of 2 meters.

This brings in mind TGD explanation (see this) of and old anomaly - the production of electron positron pairs in collisions of heavy nuclei just above the Coulomb wall - in terms of production of axion-like states in the strong non-orthogonal electric and magnetic fields of colliding giving rise to non-vanishing "instanton density" E•B which generates coherent states of electropions which are bound states of color octet excitations of electron and positrons. Electropions would decay to electron positron pairs and gamma pairs. Later also other leptopion candidates have been detected. Unfortunately they do not represent dark matter in the sense of the prevailing dogmatics so that they have b den forgotten.

Color excited electrons should not be produced in the decays of weak bosons so that they must be either very heavy as free particle or dark in TGD sense and thus having non-standard value of Planck constant given as multiple heff=n× h. Same "instanton" coupling would cause the transformations of solar axions to X rays and the change of the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field with respect to Sun would imply the characteristic variation allowing to detect the small signal from large background.

p-Adic length scale hypothesis predicts the possibility of several copies of QCD like and weak physics. This copy could correspond prime p∼ 2211 and color excitations of corresponding electrons could be in question. Mass of scaled up electropion would be about 4 micro eV. Also scaled down quarks and thus scaled down analogs of ordinary pion can be considered.

Perhaps the simplest production mechanism would be the time reversal of the mechanism assumed to produce the ob served anomalous X rays. X rays from Sun could transform to axions in the magnetic fields of the sunspots. This would predict correlation with sunspot activity.

There have been also earlier reports about axion candidates at rather low masses and p-adic length scale hierarchy and dark matter hierarchy realized in terms of heff would provide a generic explanation. In biology both hierarchies of QCD type and weak physics could play a central role. Big Science is often experienced as a reductionistic invasion proceeding towards shorter and short length scales and this view still dominates physics although the construction of new accelerators is becoming more and more expensive. Big things have big inertia and it takes a long time for Big Science to be able to turn its direction and return to the regions which it has considered to be already conquered.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2014/10/20/surfer-physicist-garrett-lisi-offers-alternative-to-string-theoryand-academia/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cross-check%2Ffeed+%28Blog%3A+Cross-Check%29

Horgan: Edward Witten, when I asked him in a recent Q&A if string theory had any serious rivals for a unified theory, replied, “There are not any interesting competing suggestions.” Comment?

Lisi: That stings a little. I don’t imagine other physicists working on fundamental non-string theories appreciate it either. Ed Witten has done incredibly impressive work, opening new doors with his insights in mathematics and physics. His papers are things of beauty. He, his students, and his colleagues have dominated the high-energy theoretical physics community with string models for decades now. However, even the most enlightened foresight from the most brilliant mind can be wrong, so it would be better if he wasn’t a dick about it.

Ulla said...

I have many times tried to open up Tony Smiths homepage without result. Has he changed the adress?
He has many interesting ideas, and collaborate with Lisi. Lately I have become more interested in how he think it and the perturbation mechanism.

Matpitka@luukku.com said...


Witten is the leader figure of M-theory. He still believes in string theory although his teacher Gross has become skeptic also also many other string gurus. In practice the age of superstrings is over.

It is perfectly understandable that Witten is not interested in searching possible competitors for string theory. This would require also a lot of effort since string theory hegemony has censored out competitors very effectively!

Witten is great mathematician. To be a great physicist requires something else. As Einstein said, the worst thing that can happen to a theoretical physicist is to become a mathematician. Good mathematician solves well-defined mathematical problems. Good theoretical physicist formulates new concepts and builds new visions.

A comment about Lisi. In the middle of the short lasting media tornado it was not mentioned that the E_8 of Lisi have been present in literature for decades, as long as we have had GUT paradigm, which has lethal problems with proton lifetime. Within few months it was demonstrated that the E_8 idea does not work group theoretically and also Lisi admitted that.

For some reason Lisi however became a name. Probably because media business wants names and also because he has a media sexy background. Media public had got enough from stories about starving ingenious scientists developing great discoveries in loneliness. Why the next Einstein could not be a rich surfer?! As physicists and mathematicians Lisi and Witten belong to totally different categories.

One should also be very careful to not make strings as such the source of evil. Only the particular realisation as super strings was a failure. Strings and associated conformal invariance (properly generalized) emerge also from TGD. These strings are however strings in 4-D space some surface, not in 10- or 11- D space and they are also highly topological objects since both ordinary braiding of strings and 2-braiding of string world sheets are possible. In quantum biology this phenomenon is in crucial role.

It would be nice if the colleagues could force themselves to read these lines and perhaps some introductions of books about TGD: these ideas are wonderful and deserve full attention. I do not want any credit for the irritating fact that this vision happened to see daylight through my brain, and I fully admit that it would have been more polite to have proper academical position and credentials;-). My sincere apologies for colleagues!;-)