Researchers make crucial advances in search for dark matter

Tokyo (The Uttam Hindu): A team of scientists has made advances in the search for dark matter, observing galaxies using new spectrographic technology and the Magellan Clay Telescope.

The team from Japan, led by Associate Professor Wen Yin from Tokyo Metropolitan University, used a new spectrographic technique to observe light arriving from two galaxies, Leo V and Tucana II.

They used the 6.5-m-wide Magellan Clay Telescope in Chile to collect light arriving on earth, paying close attention to the infrared region of the spectrum.

With a mere 4 hours of observations, precise measurements in the infrared range have set new limits on the lifetime of dark matter.

Their findings, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, highlight the crucial utility of their technology and extend the search to less explored parts of the spectrum.

Over the past century, cosmologists have grappled with an apparent inconsistency in what they saw in the universe.

Now, researchers have begun to use a combination of models and state-of-the-art observations to put limits on the properties that dark matter might have.

The team focused on a promising dark matter candidate, the axionlike particle (ALP), and considered how it “decays” and spontaneously emit light. Leading theoretical models make the near infrared part of the spectrum a particularly promising place to look.

However, the infrared is also a crowded and confusing part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is because of the vast range of sources of noise and interference from other sources.

To get around this, in their previous work, they proposed a new technique which uses the fact that background radiation tends to include a broader range of wavelengths, whereas light from a specific decay process is more strongly skewed to a narrow range.

Just like light spilling off a prism gets dimmer as different colours are spread thinner and thinner, decay events confined to a narrow range get sharper and sharper.

Thanks to the precision of the team’s technology, they were able to account for all the light they detected in the near infrared to significant statistical accuracy.

“The fact that no decay was found was then used to set upper bounds on the frequency of these decay events, or a lower bound on the lifetime of ALP particles. Their new lower bound in seconds is 10 with 25 to 26 zeros after it, or ten to a hundred million times the age of the universe,” the authors wrote.