Is This Dark Matter?

9-4-2014 | News Staff

Because detectable mass only makes up about 5 percent of the universe – and the universe is expanding faster now than in the past – a rethink of mass and gravity has been required. The umbrella term for this mass that must exist, but can’t be detected, is “dark matter.” Don’t worry if that definition is vague, no one knows any more than that.

Dark matter can be inferred by gravitational effects – and things like antimatter and baryonic clouds can be excluded – and so hundreds of explanations have been created for it. A new one by Mikhail Medvedev, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas is called “flavor-mixed multicomponent dark matter.”

Writing in Physical Review Letters, he posits that his model of dark matter can be built using the behavior of elementary particles that have been observed – or at least hypothesized. That last part is a red flag. According to today’s prevalent Standard Model theory of particle physics, elementary particles — categorized as varieties of quarks, leptons and gauge bosons — are the building blocks of an atom. The properties, or “flavors,” of quarks and leptons are prone to change back and forth, because they can combine with each other in a phenomenon called flavor-mixing.

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