Yahoo! News featured a study by a University of Cincinnati theoretical physicist that explains how fusion reactors might be useful for creating subatomic particles that could allow scientists to study dark matter.
UC College of Arts and Sciences Professor Jure Zupan his theoretical physicist co-authors at the Fermi National Laboratory, MIT and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology discussed this possibility in a paper published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
Dark matter has never been observed directly, but physicists believe it represents a majority of the mass in the universe that is attributed to matter. Dark matter is called dark because unlike normal matter it does not absorb or reflect light. Nevertheless, physicists have identified its existence through its gravitational effects, modifying motion of galaxies in the universe and stars in the galaxies. One of the main theoretical possibilities for dark matter is that it is a very light particle, the so-called axion.
Yahoo! News shared a story that first appeared in the science outlet The Brighter Side of News.
In their paper, Zupan and his colleagues considered a fusion reactor powered by deuterium and tritium in a vessel lined by lithium that is being developed in a global collaboration in the south of France. Such a reactor would produce not only energy but potentially also dark sector particles due to a large flux of neutrons that will be created in a fusion reactor.
"Neutrons interact with material in the walls. The resulting nuclear reactions can then create new particles," he said.
Their theories would solve a problem addressed in three episodes of the hit CBS show "The Big Bang Theory," which ran from 2007 to 2019. In Season 5, the problem was presented on whiteboards in the apartment of fictional physicists Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter.
Read the Brighter Side of News story.
Featured image at top: UC Professor Jure Zupan studies topics such as dark matter. Photo/Joseph Fuqua II/UC
