Don Lincoln: observation

Transcript context

…Got it. Got it. So we need another form, and we have seen zero evidence of this wind of dark matter through the Earth. Another possibility is you look where you think dark matter might be concentrated at the center of galaxies, and if dark matter exists and there’s antimatter dark matter, maybe they annihilate and make photons. And so we look for gamma rays and various other signatures of annihilating dark matter, and there are always constantly announcements of, “Oh, we saw it. Oh, we didn’t. Oh, it…” You know, the problem is that way of looking for dark matter is hard because there are other ways of making, for instance, gamma rays like neutron stars and stuff, and you really need to understand the details of galaxies really, really well to believe that. And then the final option is what I do, where we smash particles together at high energy. We try to make dark matter particles. If you make dark matter particles, because they don’t interact except via gravity, they escape with your detector. So what you’re seeing, what you hope to see, is an event where you collide particles, a dark matter particle escapes, and you don’t see it, but the recoil you see on the other side because momentum is conserved. So you see a blob of energy on this side, nothing on the other side. Maybe that’s dark matter, and that also happens with neutrinos. So you need to understand everything about neutrinos and calculate how many of those you see and then hope you see more, and then that might be dark matter. Again, that hasn’t worked. So we’ve ruled out some dark matter particles, but the problem is the range of space of possible mass, if dark matter is of a particulate form, the range of viable dark matter ranges from something like the mass of an asteroid to far lighter than an electron and everywhere in between. And we have looked. We’ve ruled out some little spots in that phase space, but that’s a big range. Is it really possible to miss a particle the size of an asteroid?…

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