Arcadian Functor

occasional meanderings in physics' brave new world

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Marni D. Sheppeard

Friday, December 05, 2008

Darkness Rising

A recent PI talk by the theoretician Itay Yavin discusses a gauge theoretic WIMP explanation of dark matter evidence, based on work with various authors, including Neal Weiner.

He was not afraid to question the validity of some of the experimental results, in which he was helped along by an audience member, who sounded suspiciously like John Moffat (I cannot view the video). However, Yavin pointed out that it is difficult to collectively dismiss results from DAMA, PAMELA, ATIC, CDF (multi muons), the WMAP haze and Integral.

The model in question looks at a breaking of a dark sector $SU(2) \times U(1)$ symmetry, resulting in a $4 \times 4$ mass matrix (for 4 bosonic states) whose parameters can be selected to fit all results mentioned above, although not via the same decay processes. To everyone's amusement, an audience member asked whether or not there were more parameters in the model than data points. Anyway, the CDF lepton jets are supposed to originate from dark photon decays. One suspects that we will see many more talks along these lines in the near future.

3 Comments:

Blogger Matti Pitkänen said...

It seems that colleagues are unavoidably approaching the realization that dark matter is ordinary matter with different value of Planck constant.

The mathematically consistent realization for the hierarchy of Planck constants of course fails in standard space-time framework and it is interesting to see how colleagues manage to skip over this without ever mentioning TGD.

I am just now working out in detail the connection between anyons,charge fractionization and large hbar hierarchy.

It seems clear that anyonic dynamics is a basic signature of dark matter implying 2-dimensional membrane like structures in all scales behaving like gigantic particle like objecs containing large numbers of ordinary elementary particles in anyonic state. Fractionization of charges is what confines these particles to these 2-surfaces.

The end of current carrying wire is this kind of 2-D surface in case of FQHE. Cell membranes are the anyonic surfaces in biology. Similar structures appear in the dark astrophysics of star and planetary systems (visible matter would condense around anyonic dark matter at spherical shells or tubular condensations of dark matter at these spherical shells). The walls of large voids would be anyonic structures in cosmic length scales.

December 05, 2008 6:33 PM  
Blogger Kea said...

Hi Matti. I wouldn't credit these stringy particly guys with being close to realising anything of the sort, although the speaker did seem quite apologetic about his 1 or 2 SUSY slides, which he quickly skipped over.

December 05, 2008 6:37 PM  
Blogger Matti Pitkänen said...

I just reactd to dark photons and something like SU(2)xU(1) in dark sector.

Of course, the notion of wimp - an ad hoc particle with properties tailored to solve some particular problem - belongs to the early childhood of particle physics when there was hope to get Nobel with good luck.

Particle physicist should think big thought. And retain concrete connection with reality. Difficult.

December 06, 2008 5:08 PM  

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