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Since the 1970s, astronomers and physicists have been gathering evidence for the presence in the universe of dark matter: a mysterious substance that manifests itself through its gravitational pull. However, despite much effort, none of the new particles proposed to explain dark matter have been discovered. In a review that was published in Nature this week, physicists Gianfranco Bertone (UvA) and Tim Tait (UvA and UC Irvine) argue that the time has come to broaden and diversify the experimental effort, and to incorporate astronomical surveys and gravitational wave observations in the quest for the nature of dark matter.

Over the past three decades, the search for dark matter has focused mostly on a class of particle candidates known as weakly interacting massive particles (or WIMPs). WIMPs appeared for a long time as a perfect dark matter candidate as they would be produced in the right amount in the early universe to explain dark matter, while at the same time they might alleviate some of the most fundamental problems in the physics of elementary particles, such as the large discrepancy between the energy scale of weak interactions and that of gravitational interactions.

Humanity is producing so much data every single minute that we either need to slow down, or scientists need to crack the problem of finding better ways of storing that data ASAP. Now, new research has taken us one step closer to the ultimate in compact data storage: putting data on a single atom.

As the basic building blocks of all matter, atoms are the smallest object we could possibly store a bit (a 1 or a 0) on, potentially shrinking down the size of existing hard drives by about a thousand times or so, if we can figure out how to get it to work.

Scientists have already made progress in storing bits on atoms, but only on a small scale and in tightly controlled lab conditions, which usually means extremely cold setups.

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The Large Hadron Collider, a massive particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, just discovered two new baryons and hints of a meson.

Absolutely terrifying.

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There’s something out there that physicists have never seen before, and it’s coming up from the bottom of the Earth. Scientists think it’s a brand-new particle.

The building blocks of matter in our universe were formed in the first 10 microseconds of its existence, according to the currently accepted scientific picture. After the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, matter consisted mainly of quarks and gluons, two types of elementary particles whose interactions are governed by quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interaction. In the early universe, these particles moved nearly freely in a quark-gluon plasma. Then, in a phase transition, they combined and formed hadrons, among them the building blocks of atomic nuclei, protons and neutrons.

In the current issue of Nature, an international team of scientists has presented an analysis of a series of experiments at major particle accelerators that sheds light on the nature of this transition. The scientists determined with precision the transition temperature and obtained new insights into the mechanism of cooling and freeze-out of the quark-gluon plasma into the current constituents of matter such as protons, neutrons and atomic nuclei. The team of researchers consists of scientists from the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, and from the universities of Heidelberg and Münster (Germany), and Wroclaw (Poland).

A central result: The record-breaking high-energy experiments with the ALICE detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the research center CERN produced matter in which particles and antiparticles coexisted in equal amounts, similar to the conditions in the early universe. The team has confirmed via analysis of the experimental data theoretical predictions that the phase transition between quark-gluon plasma and hadronic matter takes place at the temperature of 156 MeV, 120,000 times higher than that in the interior of the sun.

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AS MISMATCHES go, it’s a big one. When physicists bring the Standard Model of particle physics and Einstein’s general theory of relativity together they get a clear prediction. In the very early universe, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have come into being. Since the one famously annihilates the other, the result should be a universe full of radiation, but without the stars, planets and nebulae that make up galaxies. Yet stars, planets and nebulae do exist. The inference is that matter and antimatter are not quite as equal and opposite as the models predict.

This problem has troubled physics for the past half-century, but it may now be approaching resolution. At CERN, a particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, three teams of researchers are applying different methods to answer the same question: does antimatter fall down, or up? Relativity predicts “down”, just like matter. If it falls up, that could hint at a difference between the two that allowed a matter-dominated universe to form.

In the quantum world, the concepts of ‘before’ and ‘after’ can blend together.

The study of the subatomic world has revolutionized our understanding of the laws of the universe and given humanity unprecedented insights into deep questions. Historically, these questions have been in the philosophical realm: How did the universe come into existence? Why is the universe the way it is? Why is there something, instead of nothing?

Well, move over philosophy, because science has made a crucial step in building the equipment that will help us answer questions like these. And it involves shooting ghostly particles called neutrinos literally through the Earth over a distance of 800 miles (nearly 1,300 kilometers) from one physics lab to another.

An international group of physicists has announced that they have seen the first signals in a cube-shaped detector called ProtoDUNE. This is a very big stepping stone in the DUNE experiment, which will be America’s flagship particle physics research program for the next two decades. ProtoDUNE, which is the size of a three-story house, is a prototype of the much larger detectors that will be used in the DUNE experiment and today’s (Sept. 18) announcement demonstrates that the technology that was selected works. [The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics].

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