Hunt is on for quark dark matter

摘要

A rethink could reveal the secrets of dark matter. The mysterious particles that make up most of the unseen mass of the universe have evaded physicists for decades. But it seems they may have been looking for the wrong thing. A new hypothetical particle, related to the fundamental quarks found inside protons and neutrons, has popped out of a model originally developed to solve a separate mystery in physics. This could be the missing dark matter. What's more, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - the particle smasher at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland - could find evidence for it in a few years. Astronomers think that dark matter exists because of rapidly rotating galaxies, which would have long since disintegrated without the gravitational pull of an invisible mass.