Evidence of dark matter may have been hidden for billions of years inside ancient rocks

• The search for dark matter is the sole obsession of many scientists and laboratories around the world.
• While some labs are exploring the stars or digging deep underground, a new technique will try to track evidence of dark matter collisions in the rocks of ancient Earth.
• A new Virginia Tech lab will work with special microbiological imaging technology at the University of Zurich to try to identify crystalline “disruption” caused by the effects of dark matter.

The search for dark matter is comprehensive, and understandably so—after all, 85 percent reality consists of things and you have never seen it. This is a good reason to make sure you find it as soon as possible. In their search, scientists examined the stars in search of potentially high axion concentrations (leading dark matter candidate), hunted for elusive particle in the Earth’s atmosphereand even went deep underground looking for any clues. Now scientists at Virginia Tech and other international universities are pursuing a different kind of search with a decidedly low-tech focus: really old rocks.

With $3.5 million from the National Science Foundation (plus additional funds from the National Nuclear Security Administration), Virginia Tech’s Patrick Huber and his team are building a new laboratory to test their new dark matter theory. As the name suggests, dark matter is currently undetectable to modern science because it is believed to be a weakly interacting particle. But there is a huge amount circumstantial evidence pointing to its existencesuch as the cosmic microwave background and galactic rotation.

This is not a direct observation of dark matter, but it is a very strong hint that these theoretical particles exist. And although there are competing theories that try to explain dark matter (modified Newtonian dynamics, etc.), dark matter and dark energy are still the best. theories we have to try to explain the phenomena that we observe in the Universe.

So where do old stones come from? Well, as a dark matter detector, the Earth has one important feature – it is very old. It is more than likely that over a period of 4.6 billion years, the ancient rocks interacted with dark matter, thereby changing their crystal structures. Huber and his team set out to find evidence of those long-ago events. atomic changes.

Huber admits, however, that the idea is ambitious. “This is crazy,” he said in a press statement announcing the project. “When I first heard about this idea, I thought: this is crazy. I want to do this. Other people in midlife crisis may take a lover or buy a sports car. I have laboratory“

These “miniature fracture tracks,” as the researchers call them, are caused by high-energy particles bouncing off a nucleus within a nucleus. stonewhich knocks this core out of place. The resulting rupture leads to long-term changes in the rock’s crystal lattice, which Huber’s team hopes to identify.

“We’ll take crystal it’s been exposed to different particles over millions of years and subtracts distributions that match things we know,” Vsevolod Ivanov, a researcher at the Virginia Tech National Security Institute, said in a press statement. “Whatever is left must be something new, and it could be dark matter.”

To track these traces of dark matter, the team, in collaboration with the University of Zurich, is upgrading microbiological imaging technology typically used to map animal nervous systems to possibly detect traces of high-energy particles in the rock. The entire experimental process is still being worked out, but this new laboratory will undoubtedly provide another interesting detection method Universe the most important particle.

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits science fiction and how our world works. You can find his previous work on Gizmodo and Paste if you look closely.